


As Above (So Below)

by All_This_Wildness



Category: Death Stranding (Video Games)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Animal Death, Beached Boys, Blood and Injury, Boots - Freeform, Breathplay, Choking, Cliff Is Bitter, Cliff has tattoos, Dacryphilia, Daddy Issues, Dubcon/Noncon, Emetophilia, Full Body Penetration, Gun Kink, Higgs will cry in every chapter, I guess but yeah definitely more later, I metaphor too hard, Impromptu Surgery, Inappropriate use of issued Beretta, M/M, Power Dynamics, Questionable heartwarming content, Repatriate Higgs, Self-Indulgent, Tentacles, Umbilical Tentacles, a lot of spit and drool for some reason, daddy’s belt, eldritch goo fucking, goo meditation, goop, inappropriate egyptian references, multi chapter saga of bonding and self-hatred, references to animal death, the gross starts in the second chapter, war never changes dot jpg, ya gotta hurt to heal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:13:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22034620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/All_This_Wildness/pseuds/All_This_Wildness
Summary: This is the end. This is his legacy. There is no hope, and he is stranded.But there IS a man on the shore, one who knows his dilemma better than him—and a storm is coming.((Post Higgs Stranding. Slight canon divergence because fic is our friend, consent will both be present and not present at varying points. Spoilers for everything.))
Relationships: Clifford Unger/Higgs Monaghan, Higgs Monaghan & Clifford Unger
Comments: 15
Kudos: 170





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to my lovely wife for brainstorming this idea and being patient with me, Vigs for the smoking motif, and all of y’all for encouraging me to get back into writing. This is a joy to work on. Love ya.

Daddy taught him a lot of things. 

Taught him to read, taught him to speak, though not often enough. Taught him the essentials of four walls. Consume. Excrete. Sleep. Ad infinitum. Daddy taught him plenty. Daddy taught him enough. Yet—

He never taught him how to pray. 

It wasn’t like the boy hadn’t  **tried** . It was a part of the human condition, to look to the sky, to kiss the dirt, to scream to the grass and the bones beneath and hope someone or something screamed back. A primal hymn to nothing and nothing and nothing again. There was no significance. 

Until there was. 

Scraping his shoulders against shale, against the shore, Higgs reminisced through the blood in his mouth, out loud, in a barking laugh. The echo of his final prayer to Saint Amelie. Used he’d been, used he was, and now his humble abode remained the shores that were, but weren’t  _ his _ . 

Significance lost, the particle of God cast aside, another grain of sand in the shore. 

His head sank back, enjoyed the lap of surprisingly crisp water at his aching skull. Walking could wait til his feet didn’t feel so fucking heavy. 

—

“First time?”

The question was rhetorical. No response expected, and yet, the way the elder man’s brow hitched in mild exasperation...yeah, that was the good stuff. Higgs Monaghan had to get a rise out of people; nothing ever quenched the thirst for attention. And now, he was in a fucking uninhabited, recognition-less desert. 

He’d abandoned his cloak, for now. Not much sense in it. It was a Beach. No timefall. No people. Just the questionable serenity of a man quite literally stranded, alone. 

So color the Pharaoh surprised when he saw him there. 

The suit jacket was a surprise, especially when coupled with bare feet. Feet that had been walking a while. The cigarette drooping from the mild frown he bore was nearly worn to ash, the same ash that seemed to touch at the edges of his hair, the silvering of age. Of course, that same coloration could come from the hardships of life. It wasn’t just the tinge that betrayed his advanced age, but the lines—however handsome—that were drawn into his face, the flesh thereupon, enhancing the sharpness of cheekbones, hollowing the eyes, eyes that he could have  _ fucking sworn _ he’d seen before…

It wasn’t entirely startling, then, given his worn appearance, that after dragging those familiar unfamiliar eyes up and then down

[they  _ wrenched _ into him they  **tore** through him what was he]

the terrorist’s form, his response was a single word, in a low, smoke-gritted murmur. 

“No.”

Of course not. If he was another plaything in Amelie’s toy box, he was bound to have bounced here and back a few times. They all had. 

Higgs sank down, found himself crouching in front of where this specter sat. His first instinct was to scent him, to see if DOOMS had anything to say of the state of him, or his presence in purgatory. His olfactory systems processed, returned the scent of stale tobacco, hand-rolled cigarettes formed from the cheapest snuff one could buy. All they had, these days. Cologne, something gifted, old as well, the alcohol used as a carrier agent clearly aged, hints of honey and brandy and underneath, the deepest metallic tang, one that left him feeling like he needed a palate cleanser. It was under his tongue now. It wouldn’t leave. 

Chiral. 

He must have made a face, because the stranger chuckled, and it felt as though the earth itself moved. 

They both remained grounded. 

Inhale. Exhale. He spoke more than one word now. “Someone’s gone and rubbed your nose in it, haven’t they, boy?”

“Boy” usually denoted insult. Higgs found it charming, and let his teeth crack a predator’s grin. Mildly unhinged, but he knew no other way to smile. “Aw, have you been watchin’? Gee man, even after everything’s fucked...great to meet a fan.” Monaghan slid his tongue over his damnably chapped lips, then pointed to the side of the elder man. “This taken, ghost?”

Ghost stared, unblinking. 

Then his hand dragged through the sand, carving an arc. Patted. Invitation. 

His ass hit the dirt. Higgs felt like he’s been sitting for years, and his aim  _ had _ been to gain a little variety, but now there’s someone to bounce off of. 

Funny, how you can spend years surrounding yourself with people, systematically laying them on the altar, using them, twisting their forms into the blackened, slick beasts that had become his menagerie—funny how he could do all that, destroy the H. Demens species after birthing it, and still thirst to end his loneliness with the form of some guy. 

Higgs swept his fingers, all ten of them, back through his hair, the bruising from what few blows he’d managed to land on Sam Porter Bridges now fading. 

“So! You’ve been watching. Been waiting. Hope forever isn’t too disappointing, but you kinda look like a guy used to disappointment.”

“You have no idea.”

“Now that’s just  _ insulting _ . We’re both here. I have an inkling.”

Metallic increased, and burned, and he found himself salivating more than was natural. 

Those eyes were on him now, but he couldn’t meet them, so instead, he watched him flick the spent cigarette away. Curiously...it disappeared. 

Which was...impossible. 

Was he part of the beach? A mirage?

Wherever his heart still managed to beat, its pace increased. 

Hand once empty filled again, another cigarette summoned in a flicker of flame, lit by the same kinesis, drawn by the same lips. They pursed, just so, and the man leaned his head back, let the smoke come from his lungs, in a burning curl through his nostrils. “How many times have you died now, Higgs?”

The man leaned over, and shoulder nudged shoulder. They shared the same stagnant air. 

The beat stopped. 

It took seven seconds to start again. 

_ He knew him.  _

**_And he was real._ **

—

“‘At least once more.’ That’s what you say, when she asks, when you come here. I remember, now. I’ve seen you kneel at the altar and clutch at her thighs, begging for your next mission.” Clifford Unger scraped his nail against the plane of his own lower lip.

Strange, though. Whenever this particular peon graced his presence, the death masks were in place, the black for the wrappings, the gold to seal the sarcophagus. He liked him better like this. The steel of Homo Demens’ leader was far softer when tempered with fear, or bewilderment, or assuredly some cocktail of the two. If he were in a less...stable mindset, maybe he’d have a drink. 

For now, he was tired. He required rest. He’d earned it. 

At any moment, fate would whip up a storm and force him to the mortal plane, mindless yet cunning. Abomination first and man second. Whispers of “ _ where is my BB _ ” hissing through a hail of bullets and spatters of brain matter. 

Drag, exhale, rinse and repeat. 

Unger remained where he was, let their shoulders keep contact, dragged his tongue against the back of his teeth, almost seeming to mouth his words before letting them out. “Both parts of you are here now, though. That’s a shame…

“There’s no coming back from that.”

The young man set his jaw. Nothing glib or pithy exited him. But the clench of his mandible...a tangible knot of worry there. 

Cliff allowed his eyes to narrow. Before he could stop himself, he reached forward. He ignored how both of Monaghan’s hands suddenly flew up, caught his wrist, and squeezed. His own singular grip pressed upon the muscles he’d seen flexing, forcing his mouth just partway open, noting the...moisture therein. 

If he used more pressure, he could just...snap that bone in half. 

After all, there wasn’t much human left in him. 

He exhaled another puff of smoke, forced that face to his own, and then...took his own cigarette, nabbed from the battlefield itself, and pressed it between lips agape. 

The onyx seepage their eyes both shared welled in Higgs’s eyes, though more likely from the pressure than any emotional response. 

“‘One more’ doesn’t exist. It’s a fallible, impossible number. Scrawl an equation into the sand, it gets washed away. 

“Welcome to eternity.”


	2. dredge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (violence and non-con present)
> 
> In for a penny, in for a pound.
> 
> Higgs speaks. Cliff listens.

It was, as they say, the same old song and dance. 

Cliff is there. Except when he isn’t. Yet the desperation for acknowledgment nearly had Higgs tripping over his feet to get to him when sighted. 

_ Nearly _ . 

After all, beggars can’t be choosers, and choosers hardly beg. He reasoned it out through the use of every stupid fucking idiom his uncle shoved into his head, lightly pummelled into the more spongey fibers of his brain with a pair of too-eager fists. 

But there was a man on the beach, and familiarity was king these days. Two wretches on the shore, sealed together with nothing but a common enemy and the drip, drip, drip of whatever fell from their eyes. Brotherhood. Camaraderie. Something painted on the edges of cave walls, but never in the center. All that was missing was an errant, and yet thoughtful beat. The sewing together of hearts. 

Bumming a smoke was nearly as good, right?

Maybe someday long ago before the Stranding, this might have been normal. Maybe if it wasn’t on an existential plane akin to purgatory, it might have been. If this wasn’t  **hell** then it could have been the very definition of homeostasis. 

At least he stood on the grass this time. 

Higgs found his fingers flexing,  _ Panthera leo  _ readying for the hunt. 

The hunt, in this particular scenario, was a game of wile and cunning, less so one of physical prowess. 

The past several...days? Cycles? It was incredibly onerous to try and gauge time—he’d spent quasi-wooing this stranger who wasn’t. Clifford Unger was a difficult case to crack, especially when he was in one of his more tempestuous moods. 

Day after day, he’d seek him out. It became a fool’s errand. If Unger was there, then he was. If he wasn’t, then he wasn’t. It was easy to tell, and the terrorist found that he  _ knew  _ his status, linked inexorably with a stretch of sand. A turn of his head, a tracking of his eyes, and there he’d be. 

His line of questioning started too obvious, the extrovert in him far too forward. Often the Captain would simply stare through him. More often, he’d leave, shimmering through the air like a desert mirage, or shifting into the most delicate fibers of burnt-through ash that melted on the tongue, caught in a mouth that had been open mid-greeting.   
  
The taste left him wanting. For what, he...didn’t know.   
  
But he’d been thinking. He’d given up prayer, for now, chosen to instead work upon the beach he now inhabited. A man of the wilderness, of the wilds he’d been committed too. That, however, didn’t mean that he was subject to them...that much was denied the grains, the pebbles, the lapping shore and the stoic clouds, the figures that hung suspended in the distance with their foreboding silhouettes. He was going to get out. He was going to secure freedom.    
  
There had been no hope, but now there was a man on the beach.   
  
Clifford Unger had to be the key to all this. There was something  _ different _   
  
[terrifying]   
  
about him. And though he didn’t know him, he knew of him. The supercells. The mythos that had been passed back and forth in supposedly-discrete messages between Sam Porter Bridges and his confidant, the zombie man.    
  
Clifford Unger was dead. But he appeared, in some fashion, to defy his own bodily state, and appear on the earthly plane, like Jesus Fucking Christ himself.   
  
It was this transportation method that had caught a fishhook in Monaghan’s fevered mind, and there it remained, festering open a wound of curiosity that had mated with his own natural curiosity.   
  
If the guy would ever listen to him though...that remained a vital component.   
  
As haunted as he was with his own DOOMS, he couldn’t  _ make _ him do a damn thing. Stuck without a BB, without a mask. Higgs was stripped down to the essentials. But he had made it through worse.   
  
As if he were entering the house of a revered friend, he crouched down. After a bit of finangling with zippers and laces, he shucked off his boots, and the terrorist instead let the cool, supple feel of grass settle below his feet. There were a few rocks here and there. Instead of being a nuisance, they remained a reminder of the artist’s brush, providing contrast to the dewy plant life.   
  
Up an incline, slight though it was, and there was the ghost, smoking yet again, his face tracked with the same inky tears that painted his own upon so many occasions. Were they there now? He hardly ever checked these days.   
  
Higgs cleared his throat.   
No recognition.   
  
And his own steel eyes rolled, with sarcasm, with annoyance. The sigh he gave was juvenile. The way he kicked at a larger rock, which then tumbled down the small incline, matched the rest of his demeanor. “One of these days you’re going to talk to me again, shifty. Or just listen.   
  
“I have a theory.”   
  
They had been over this before.   
  
  
[“You have a ha. You have a ka. But those are only two pieces of what makes us human. There are actually nine--...You see--there’s a shape to us all, a loose definition, one that transcends the ability to cross mortal and non-mortal planes. That motherfucker is our shuyet, our shadow...it shows how we’re  **perceived** , our legacy, but it’s not  _ actually _ \--”   
  
“This is Egyptian mythology.”   
  
“Mmkay, you’re not taking me seriously here. But you know what goes there, what tries to fuck up that porter, that’s not you. That’s not human. That’s gotta be your shuyet.”   
  
“Is this what Strand has you subscribing to, Monaghan? Wall carvings, dead in a desert?”   
  
“They’ve been right so far, haven’t they?”   
  
“Stop playing Pharaoh.”   
  
“I’m just sayin’--there’s a chance, Cliff. A  _ chance,  _ that you and I could--”   
  
“There’s nothing. I finished what was needed.”   
  
“I have a theory.”   
  
“I don’t  **_care_ ** .”]   
  
  
If this man was going to be his singular opportunity to walk as a living man again, arisen from the dead like a great avatar of myth, he was going to have to  _ listen _ eventually. And not just hear.   
  
This time, when he cleared his throat, twice as loud and forcibly comical, he earned a cock of a head, the swivel of neck and spine and slight twist of shoulder that seemed just slightly too fast. Uncanny.    
  
Inhuman.   
  
He couldn’t decide if he liked that, or if the sudden swell in the pit of his stomach was bile ready to become vomit.   
  
“You gonna listen now, sugar? Because I’m really tired of you playin’ hide and seek with me.” One of Higgs’s thumbs slid in the pocket of his slacks, as he lifted his chin, quite nearly the caricature of a gunslinger in the old west. You know. If he’d had a damn gun.   
  
Unger, on the other hand, seemed to have his hackles higher than usual. There was a glassiness to his eyes, a slowness in the way his mouth parted, and allowed smoke to drip out, to dip and furl just below the lower fullness of his lips, before dissipating higher into the air. The former Captain then exhaled whatever air a phantom breathed, and it was gone.   
  
Sexy.   
  
Even sexier, the way the elder man’s tongue came out, just barely dabbed at the surface of that chapped mouth. This particular habit, he’d picked up more than once now. It seemed to signify something grating on the man, but he’d never say what.   
  
Some other time, he might have pressed for it. Might even have tried to bite it out of that mouth. After all, he’d been the particle of God. He gave the world weight, and he tore it away. Entropy took, it didn’t ask. It ate alive. It didn’t care if the subject was screaming.   
  
[ _ that was life that was love it was the scream and the ache and the wailing and gnashing of teeth it was the way Daddy had closed his windpipe the way the first man he’d kissed broke three of his ribs the way the first girl had cried and cried and cried and cried and _ ]   
  
How times had changed.   
  
Higgs found himself dragged out of this mess of thoughts, when the other finally spoke.   
  
“You tempt fate.” Soft, accented, the drag of the last two syllables longer than the first. Echoing the way that he slowly held out the cigarette and tapped it twice. Ash fell. Why did it seem duality echoed here? Maybe that was the way Amelie liked to file things. Two by two. One against the other.   
  
The god that failed, and a spirit that he didn’t understand, though not for lack of trying.   
  
Unger resumed smoking, and paid no more heed to the fly on his proverbial withers. And now, after a very deliberate inhale and exhale, Monaghan’s bare feet began their circling. He’d practiced this particular form of peacocking earlier, when he was pretty sure no one had been watching. The lion’s stride and pride entered the tendons and muscles of his lean calves and thighs, and settled there in the form of a swagger that betrayed whatever pride he still feigned having in himself and his endeavors. But would it be enough?   
  
Silver eyes flitted over the former soldier. “You think this is fate? You think we were meant for this? Because I’m pretty sure eternal damnation isn’t what we owe brave soldiers. You, for your war, and lil’ old me…” Here, he chuckled, the softest little laugh, his pace continuing in that easy circle. “...well, I did my part, didn’t I? Traipsed along like I was asked. Did everything perfect

  
[except when I  **failed** ]   
  
and look at where it got me.” He held his arms wide, the gesture of a boxer entering the ring, or a thespian doing his best to make good old William Shakespeare proud. “You think you’re supposed to be here, like this? Like... _ this? _ ”   
  
The last word held exaggeration, and with it came movement. Always movement. Higgs had a tendency to keep his hands busy, and now he gesticulated dangerously close to the other man’s face.   
  
“I’m telling you, something’s wrong with you. You’ve been split apart, somehow. Scattered. Fucked.” A single finger waved, nearly even caught the skin of Unger’s cheek. “And we could figure that out, but you seem to be more interested in your eternity, in a life of brooding, of mourning a braindead bitch and a son who you couldn’t save.   
  
“Ever consider moving on?”   
  
A goad was a gamble. Quite often, it got him places. This one resulted in dead silence. No...well and truly  _ dead _ . After a count of several loaded beats, Higgs realized that there was no lapping of waves. No wind. Like wearing earmuffs, or being underwater. Nothing.   
  
But there was a stare.   
  
A stare and a scent, the same one from before. So sharp, so metallurgic, and instantly he was swallowing back a well of saliva, but his lips spread wide. Hyena grin, too many teeth. Brows furrowed and conjoined the numbers and symbols he’d dredged out of flesh and ink on his forehead.   
  
“See? That got your attention, didn’t it? Ain’t so hard to pay me heed, if you put your ninth-a-mind to it.”   
  
More. Increased. Something stung at the corners of his eyes. The most likely culprit would have been the cigarette smoke. But Cliff’s gaze remained far less watery, and unblinking. He retained his silence.   
  
Higgs clucked his tongue. “Touch a nerve, and you still don’t budge. Shame, Unger. Big damn shame. Someday...someday you’ll pull through for me.”    
  
Though today had been different, it would end, the same song and dance. Still, he couldn’t deny his need for creature comforts, and those little burning brands this soldier seemed to tug out of his nightmares, rolls of nicotine and paper...he could use one of those, to vent his frustration, to soothe his own aching consciousness. Even through his DOOMS.   
  
Trouble was, he’d just pissed off Sad Daddy, and there was...only one available. He wasn’t likely to go out to the store and nab another one for him.   
  
So, he reached for it, breathing out a sigh of discontent, and it was then that the air  **snapped** .   
  
Too sharp to be blunt force trauma. More like the smack of a whip, neat across the knuckles, but instead it was strapped up against his psyche, a mental flashbang of sorts, and impossible to source. It was what drew his attention first.   
  
Second, was Clifford Unger’s hand wrapped around his arm, just below his wrist, progress halted just before he’d reached the goal, which had been magicked away, leaving the only smoke available, the only fix remaining the curls of white that now hissed from between clenched teeth that slowly parted.   
  
There was tar in his mouth. He didn’t....he didn’t know how he hadn’t seen that before, but it was there, just beneath his tongue.    
  
And his grip was  _ tightening _ .   
  
“Move on, is what you suggest. I see.” It was almost...almost like he could feel the bones compressing, drawing in on each other to bow sweet music together as they kissed too tight, as the musculature between them protested, but started to give way. And he could see it happening. That was probably the worst part...yet Monaghan couldn’t look away, as the splintering started, as Cliff continued his soft, even, deadly-serious soliloquy. “You flaunt your freedom, then your servitude. Your power, and yet, you call the kettle even as you’re powerless. That’s...sad, Higgs.”    
  
When the first bone popped, he heard it, too loud, almost as if it weren’t muffled by skin, by the crushed and ruptured muscle that was already crying agony and myoglobin into his system. Any breath he possessed halted, and his mouth gaped open wide.   
  
One.   
  
[ _ My _ ]   
  
Two.   
  
[ **_God_ ** .]   
  
The second went just as easy, radius following ulna. And then he  _ twisted _ it. Ran the fragments into one another, sliced them into soft tissue, used that grip to ram their torsos together in a fashion all too violent and plainly forced.   
  
“You stand in a landscape all your own, but it’s not enough. Why don’t you move on, Higgs? What is it you fucking  **love** so much that  **you** can’t let go?!”   
  
His shriek in response to the rising anger in Unger’s words, a howl, a ragged and frightened thing. Rabbit in a snare, now aware that the beast it was caught by was in color, was vivid, was oh-so-tangible. He had to stare, eyes and mouth agape, as the aftershocks of broken bones shot up into his shoulder and ricocheted through his spine. Their stance was nearly akin to a pair of dancers, rigid, as if they had only just begun to learn one another’s gesticulations and affectations for movement.    
  
_ They had only just begun. _ _   
_   
And yet again, Clifford Unger had proven that he was ostensibly, plainly,  **_painfully_ ** real. Shadow or not. Whatever pieces of him held him now, they were already too much, too powerful, too present. What would happen when they all came together?   
  
Endorphins and adrenaline drugged his system from the pain he didn’t realize he’d been missing, and the tears stinging in his eyes caused him to bark out a laugh. One after the other. Gooseflesh rose when the back of the soldier’s hand found his cheek, hard, and he reeled backward, bellowing in tenor his agony when his wrist still wasn’t released.   
  
“N-...Now we’re talkin’.” Higgs quite nearly didn’t recognize his own voice, the way that it strained. An edge of panic decorated every syllable, maybe singed there by the chemicals soaking every cortex of his brain.

Except...Cliff wasn’t talking. Not any more. He was staring again, but it seemed as though he stared  **through** his companion rather than at him. When he squeezed the injury again, and Higgs reeled, he released him. One and two steps, backward on the grass, and he fumbled, more or less ending up on his ass. The grass was slick now, too slick. Wet, actually. 

_ When had the tide come in? _

But the “water,” its slickness, its oily, familiar texture...It encouraged him to roll onto his side, toward the arm that wasn’t damaged. His consciousness bit into the part of the beach that might allow him a little jump, just a _little_ one, maybe spook the man by popping up behind him, on the part of the hillside that yet remained above the tar--but the hands that suddenly closed on his limbs and dragged him down into thickening, soaking gunk seemed to prevent that very thing. Skeletal hands. Grasping hands. Familiar to the man before him, but not to Higgs himself, aside from the occasional whisper of rumor and the brief data passed between Bridges servers. Umbilical cords from each one, ablaze with the same fury that lit each and every cig he’d stolen and borrowed from Clifford, snaking beneath the man’s unassuming clothing to connect to whatever was beneath.  
  
Unger was above him. When the terrorist surged up, the coupled pull of the four beings below and the pressure of Cliff’s shoe on his chest, tight in his ribs, shoved him into gravel and grass that he could no longer separate. What lean muscle Higgs possessed started to tense, and bunch.  
  
And fight.  
  
He screamed, and it was a scream of rage, of impossibility. No one held him down like this! No one!  
  
No one but a ghost.  
  
That ghost was on top of him, soon enough. A knee between his thighs. Practiced. Even in this state, throbbing in pain and coursing with panic, Higgs could tell when someone had been between a man’s legs before. His intentions weren’t easily scryed, but **fuck** , if he didn’t feel something in the end of his spine as his body was covered, something that pushed forward and into the inner planes of his thighs.  
  
He couldn’t close them if he tried.  
  
Higgs laughed, and maybe that was a mistake, but he couldn’t help the reflex, the response to impending danger, to turn the drama mask from one way to another. Metal coursed through his mouth, and he had to spit off to one side to rid himself whatever slickness had gathered on tongue and teeth. “Oh, is that it? Is this what you want, Clifford Unger? You a sicko? Always dreamt of fucking a guy to dea--”  
  
No backhand this time. A punch snapped his head sideways, and _fuck_ , he must have known how to box, because it caught him perfectly on the jaw. Miraculous that he didn’t immediately have to spit his own teeth into the sea. The bruise already echoed under his skin, and Monaghan shuddered, revolted at how every spreading ache immediately fostered heat in the thickening interest between his legs, at his shrinking will to combat his own shame and free himself from the Captain’s minions.  
  
The same way that spittle streaked his chin, he found the other man, this impassive being, had touches of black in the corners of his mouth, in the finer lines of his lips, creeping through like visible plague. His face was streaked. Stranger still, it seemed to bud like dew from certain pores of his skin, seemed to stick and ooze through his clothing...  
  
As before, when they’d first found each other, his jaw was taken in hand, cradled there this time with a sternness that he couldn’t shake if he tried. But he didn’t.  
  
“Someone forgot to love you, didn’t they?”  
  
The words were unsure. Distant. But coupled with the strangest action. Higgs anticipated more violence, but the man above simply smiled, and he was baffled by the undeniable _sadness_ in the expression, only for a moment as his head was then turned to the side, and gently-yet-forcibly pressed into the rising tide.  
  
Fear spiked in him, and impaled.  
  
Where bony fingers yet clutched, with gloves rotted away, his clothing was sopping with solidifying, thickening tar. It didn’t cover the whole of his, but it was just thick enough to saturate, and render immobile. His rabbit heart caterwauled in response, as he felt it against his skin. In his skin, IN, in--  
  
 ** _It was pushing into his fucking skin._** _  
_  
Clifford remained above, a benevolent malevolent god, only one hand busy keeping him under. Monaghan only saw him in flashes, in splashes, when he struggled through instinct hard enough to get a gulp of air. But the tar, the blackness, the ooze, it was pressing tight against his scalp, and the sensation was getting close to that which held his limbs. Nothing like it had ever touched at his nervous system, but he could have sworn, on everything he once held holy, that he was being touched upon at a cellular level.  
  
Nothing had actually penetrated him, not yet, but the feeling of being violated only increased the pressure of what now rested against the other’s clothed thigh, still beneath his jumpsuit, the line of his cock an undeniable line. If he had to die, it appeared he’d go out in the midst of a happy ending. If this could, indeed, be considered happy.  
  
Tar went in his mouth. He spat it out as well. Went under again.  
  
With a sigh that he barely heard, that almost seemed to reverberate with elation, the Captain moved his hand upward. Pinched Higgs’s nose shut, and pressed him back under.  
  
There was no preventing how hungry his lungs grew, and eventually his more base demands won out, and his mouth open, and gulped, and drank.   
  
It was seawater, and the same chiral sharpness, but somehow, drowning as he was, waterboarded by otherworldly fluid, he could smell something. The aftershave, familiar, floating with those hints of bourbon. Tobacco. Bitter, black blood.  
  
Cliff. He was tasting Cliff. The avatar of his destruction, familiar and altogether completely different from his former goddess, the one who would put him down and at last seal his fate, combing him back and away from the Beach and at last into the sweet, blissful arms of absolutely nothing.  
  
He sobbed. He tried.  
  
[No one heard.]  
  
Everything within him was of the other man, including the pain in his chest, the ache of self-hatred. Oh, there was a hint, a little whiff of yet another thing they shared, the blame, _blame_ **blame**. The cave paintings were inside his lungs now, and he spluttered to attempt to eject and deny them, to no avail.  
  
When the water rose, lifted above his now-inert and restrained form, so too did the shadow above lower down. Breathing without breathing, Higgs noted the hand that carded through his hair, the chest that met his own, his pulse a panicking bird against one that was slow and even...too slow; a dead man’s heart only set into motion under certain circumstances. Whatever had soaked through his clothes seemed to follow the same movement, slithering against and _through_ his skin, passing through pores, pushing deeper and deeper as he was drenched. Fucking into the spaces between, with gentle pulses and presses. Kinetic sex, rape by osmosis.  
  
He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t fucking resist it. He moaned into nothing, his lungs unable to give up their bounty through the clogging and cloying Unger had induced. The same shit crawled into his aching, broken arm and almost seemed to expand and fill. All of it parroted this, and suddenly, he was full, even teased at the more tender entrance between his legs with this sickening sensation, then started that inward push as well.   
  
His dick leaked. Cliff mingled with it.  
  
“Perhaps someone did. Maybe they lied.”  
  
Wet, against his cheek. Higgs didn’t know how he kenned that particular notion, because he was already drowning. His lips were wet with his venom.  
  
Expansion. Creation. Divination.   
  
Consumption.  
  
He felt it in his guts now, too far, too deep, pressed in deeper than any man, any woman, anything he had forced into his body in a moment of incredible need and hunger. The size and shape were impossible to determine, as much as his mind reeled, through the panic, and tried.  
  
“That’s what separates us, Higgs.”  
  
Slow, languid motions, passing through his pores, fucking through them, gently defiling his throat, his ass, soaking into his brain, his thoughts, his past. Would he ever be clean again?  
  
[ _don’t stop_ ]  
  
“I at least had that much.”  
  
[ _please don’t fucking stop_ ]  
  
Monaghan must have missed the part where Cliff had slid down, but he did now register breathing, through the muck, against his throat, the drip, drip, drip of whatever fell from lips, and his hips made a pitiful attempt to buck upward when a hand planted firm over his sex and gripped.  
  
“But no one’s **ever** going to love you.”  
  
He comes with Unger’s teeth in his throat, latched in like a beast. He comes, and suddenly, there’s no skeletal battalion, there’s no tar, there’s nothing inside him at all. He was no longer drowning,--just a screaming, sobbing man, a pitiful mess being devoured by the man above, with the cold of the faux earth below. He wailed, he _screamed,_ and felt the briefest tinge, as though something passed from mouth to blood, in the hammering beat of his jugular.  
  
The only slickness there then was his sweat, the red at his neck, the embarrassing spending between his legs, within his clothing.  
  
When Cliff sat up…  
  
He looked baffled.  
  
He blinked twice. One. Two.  
  
The terrorist’s eyes took him in, noted each little change in his state of spent over-sensitivity, and beheld as the man’s expression, still streaked with blackness, slowly transformed into a look of abject horror.   
  
Almost as if witnessing the actions of  
  
[shuyet]  
a different man.  
  
He stood back and away.   
  
And then he was gone.  
  
There wasn’t much incentive to move now. The grass was back, his feet bare, the sound of the waves had returned in the distance. Higgs didn’t bother. His arm still felt like it was on fire, but it was now a dull burn.  
  
He laughed, and he sobbed, and he stared wide-eyed through tears at the sky, at the place where his new deity had been, had covered him. Abandoned again. Something in the atmosphere, in the way the air smelled of ozone and smoke and bourbon, told him he wouldn’t be for long.  
  
They’d talk again, soon. Because he’d finally been heard.  
  
That gorgeous, cynical, anguished beast of a man had finally processed something of truth coming from the jackal’s mouth.  
  
 _And he was right._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SOAK THE BOY THROUGH LIKE A SLICE OF WHITE BREAD WITH GRAVY was the only note I had written for this. Do with that as you will.
> 
> Upcoming: character development, as well as the development of daddy kink as defined by daddy issues.
> 
> Big thanks to the discord server. You’re my favorite brainworms/braingoo.
> 
> Find me on twitter @clint_theo_leo


	3. exhale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Breathe with me.

_ The most merciful thing he’d ever done, was to snap the neck of a deer. _

—

Days passed. 

And passed. 

And passed. 

It was difficult to ascertain the passage of time. There was no sun, no moon to go by, that held actual bearing in the heavens. No clocks. No yearly events to gauge things by. There was only the Beach. 

Things might also have been skewed by Higgs’s wretched sleep cycle, something that had been ruined long ago when he’d been in the porter business himself. His natural fixations kept him from rest on a near-constant basis, his consciousness dragged through the waking world on the basis of sheer mania alone, coupled by the disease in his system. He woke, he destroyed until he could sleep. Consume, excrete, die. Repeat. 

The trees that manifested in the wasteland he’d been condemned to had their uses, and he’d snapped off a couple of branches. They’d taken some convincing. The knife helped. The knife always helped. With them, and a bit of fabric, tattered and torn and starting to wear less gilded than before, he fashioned a splint to fasten his battered arm.   
  
Not that it stopped him from constantly covering the swell and squeezing. That was confirmation.   
  
He was still here.   
  
\--   
  
_ He’d been on leave. Somewhere green, without the hiss of the desert winds, without the constant catch of dirt and sand in his already ashen hair. Trees, in the distance, so different from the scant ones that held focus in the places he reluctantly disposed of human life.  _   
  
\--   
  
More importantly,  **he** was still here.   
  
The ghost sulked. Something about the way the air shifted, and seemed to curve around Higgs rather than buffeting him, the presence of his chiral allergies flaring to produce dark tears coupled with the sapidity behind his teeth that made him practically drool--definitely, definitely still around, the troubled old man.    
  
He didn’t have any wounds to lick, but he’d retreated in much the same fashion. Until he didn’t.   
  
The uniform caught him by surprise, caused the hyena’s cackle to sound once again in the back of his mind. Should’ve known that Sad Daddy would show up like this at some point, dressed to the nines in the finest of fatigues.    
  
And yes, the uniform was striking, but even more so was the fashion in which Unger seemed to sizzle around the edges, as though surrounded by some great source of heat, like tarmac left out in the pre-Stranding sun for far, far too long. There, he broiled, and Higgs noted with great relief and satisfaction that there was softness to his eyes, and with even greater pleasure that he was, as usual, drafting his usual share of cancer through the cigarette clasped in his fingers.   
  
Just like old times. A week ago? A month? How long had it been?    
  
Didn’t matter.   
  
This time, he summoned what might he yet possessed, disconnected from his former goddess as he was, and made the jump to just in front of the other man. Faster than the trudge. When there, his hand was already out, begging the brand, the burning thing between Unger’s lips, though maybe begging Unger himself.   
  
And this time, he received.   
  
A slow pass, a brush of finger to finger, though he also caught the wry look the former soldier gave his mangled appendage.   
  
“Yep, your handiwork is still on the mend. Proud of yourself?”   
  
The Captain seemed to mull his thoughts over. Not particularly the man to blurt his first instinctual thought; instead he allowed things to dis- and then re-combobulate within the machinations of his turmoil and brilliance. Even more disconcerting, then, when his lips turned in the faintest of smirks--one that nearly sent Higgs’s knees to buckling--and made the casual-yet-cruel response in a single syllable: “Yes.”   
  
He wasn’t a cruel man. He’d only begun to know him, but the terrorist knew that much. Cruel men didn’t taste vengeance like this one did. They’d have thought nothing of it.   
  
With reverence, he brought the cigarette to his lips, pulled hard, exhaled, pulled hard again. He was being greedy, but the display left him winded. Somehow, his backwards logic had him longing for toxicity rather than fresh air.   
  
“Your theory.”   
  
That was enough to excite him alone. Yes! He’d been right. The animal wasn’t just wounded in pride, he was curious. Monaghan’s teeth dug into the filter he yet held between his teeth, and a finger wagged. “There it is! There it  **fucking** is!”   
  
More personality, as the uniformed man rolled his eyes and lifted his brows, a pained expression that hardly experienced any pain. “You keep saying I’m...fractured. I’m beginning to...see where you might draw it from.” Calluses touched against the younger’s lips, and good lord, were they  _ rough _ . Clifford removed the smoke, eyed the flattened end of it with an almost puppyish look of disappointment, and then shoved it back, letting Higgs revel in the whiplash of his humanity even as he did the inhuman thing and pulled another cigarette from absolutely nowhere.   
  
He could’ve danced all night. If night was a thing.   
  
“You are. And whatever force pulls your shuyet to and fro, it’s gotta be enough to haul us out, same as you fucked with Sam Bridges. Get me?”   
  
How many times was Unger going to ogle him from top to bottom? And why, fucking  _ why _ did it grow more appealing each and every time, ripping his mouth wide in a jester’s grin with too many teeth?   
  
“I get you.”   
  
\--   
  
_ The rental vehicle had suffered. Electric. They’d all been shifting away from gasoline, from petrol those days. And she’d felt so terrible, crippling a creature like that. _   
  
\--   
  
The shelter itself looked...well, frankly Higgs didn’t know his War Lore well enough to truly place the structure, but perhaps Vietnam? Almost tropical, almost fitting to be pitched haphazard like the little shack was on the beach. It was a new development, yet somehow welcome. He’d spent years yearning, wondering about what might be beyond the depth and breadth of four walls, and yet, sometimes that contained space was the most comfortable. And this, of course, was about as miniscule as it came: a stool, a radio, a cot, a helter-skelter table. The basics.   
  
Clifford was looking over his wound now, over the break he’d made.    
  
There wasn’t too much of a point to trying to set it further; every time the injured man bothered to move the thing, he noted how many bone fragments shivered inside. Their sheer numbers, the memory of his dance with the devil, and the fostering of the foundations of some new piety...he couldn’t lie. Occasionally it was too much for his body to handle, and he’d feel his thighs clench, feel every inch of his pathetic cock ache for the memory of when a man told him he’d never find love, all stirred up and mangled in a cocktail of lamentation and broken bones.   
  
Color him surprised when Cliff’s brow hitched, noting the reedy whine he issued at the handling of his arm.   
  
By no means was the good Captain a psychiatrist, and yet...he seemed to  _ know _ where pleasure and pain intersected beautifully with shame, and he knew how to twist the knife in just right, to the point of Bending before Breaking. And then pushing it right over the edge, over that which heralded the name of his birth. Over the craggy precipice, dashed on the rocks below.   
  
“No sense biting it back, Higgs. No one can hear you.” There was a certain amusement beheld in Cliff’s tone. “...Your arm’s pretty thoroughly fucked, though.” And it didn’t fade, it danced through the timbre of the man’s accent, each and every word, though his voice did grow softer.   
  
That tone, he knew. Awe. Awe of himself, of his...what, his becoming? His undoing? Evolution was a tricky bitch, and now she’d accidentally bred an abomination through her own daughter, Extinction. Now a nightmare walked the Beach, and if they got lucky...   
  
Higgs leaned forward on the rickety stool, caught one of his bare feet on the haphazard wooden flooring, to duck his head, and look upward at the errant soldier, wiggling his fingers to show that there was something yet still constructed correctly within his limb. “Won’t need it when I have the kids back, you know. You’d be pretty impressed by them. Can summon bigger BTs than anyone else.” The opposite hand, the one not mangled, stroked along his skin, revealed by the lack of sleeves on the jet-tinged tank top he wore beneath his jumpsuit, which had been pulled down, however carefully, to his waist for this examination. Lean and limber muscle showed, the finer lines of veins, the messily hand-poked cartouche down the length of one inner forearm.   
  
In opposition, the elder man still wore camouflage, but his sleeves were rolled up, and that revealed something of kinship between them, as Unger’s own arms were littered with an assortment of well-meshed traditionally styled tattoos, clashing patterns of floral motif and screaming animals. Beautiful. Terrible. Higgs’s brain itched, and his teeth ached, at his wanting to know how far up they went. Anything could be under that armor, that cloth.    
  
[ _ Anything at all _ .]   
  
Staring was one of his less popular habits, and he knew full-well he’d been caught. This time he’d been the one doing the ogling. It seemed both were shameless, though, as Cliff suddenly caught his jaw, a cradling which was becoming all-too-familiar.   
  
“I could put your eyes out.”   
  
The same earlier callus stroked through the stubble and softness of Higgs’s facial hair, rolled over his upper lip before pulling down the bottom.   
  
“And feed them to you.”   
  
Unger’s lips pursed. Parted, and then pursed again, setting a tight line. His head listed to one side. “...I never used to have thoughts like these.”

There was no hiding the disappointment in his own blown-wide gaze, as Higgs clicked his tongue, slapped the man’s hand away, and wagged a finger of his own. “Shouldn’t be so hesitant to indulge in a good time, after what you’ve been through.”

“You’d die.”

“Probably.”

Vengeful as this spirit was, the terrorist couldn’t help but catch an inkling of what may have been concern in the back of the ex-soldier’s eyes. And that was what made the jester grin falter, more than the return of the hand. The tightening of it. That was welcome. Pity was not. 

[they were allowed to look but they weren’t allowed to  **SEE** ]   
  
Yet, he could also notice, just as clearly, the range of emotion Clifford Unger went through.   
  
Guilt, first. A stern furrowing of the brow, a consideration of what he’d wrought upon the other the last time they’d clashed. The beach. The rising tide. The inundation of an inert and helpless man with his very being.   
  
Consideration, second. Higgs spoke some fragment of truth, and they both knew it. Yes, he was the shuyet at times, and without his essential parts. Osiris scattered in the desert, while Isis wailed. And yes, he was owed his due.   
  
That all led to the slow roll of his mouth, drawing lip over teeth and back again, a thing he almost seemed to mimic in his fingers’ manipulation of Monaghan’s own. The terrorist fought, as he was wont to do, never one to roll over and take what was given him, in spite of his predilection for debasement. Instead, he nipped those digits, bit and nibbled in a concert of interest and defiance.   
  
The grip he’d grown so used to upon his mandible released. Shifted.   
  
And then was upon his throat.   
  
“What do you get from this?” His accent bit through each monosyllabic word, always a touch heavier on the European, his childhood spent in some “idyllic” village, his hands having scraped out a living in a world that never truly intersected with Higgs’s. Cliff rolled his head on his shoulders, but the movement was subtle, and predatory, and something so slight had never set the former particle’s nerves aflame. There was consideration, a firm press of thumb to pulse before the second part of the interrogation came. “You have nothing. Nothing to bargain with other than an idea you dreamed up in your fever-ruined brain. What do you get, Higgs, out of tormenting me like this?”   
  
That answer was easy.   
  
“Opportunity.” He hissed.   
  
Unger contemplated. Unger  _ squeezed _ .   
  
Oxygen deprivation had been the norm back in the day. But Daddy had never known just how to do it. He seemed insistent upon trying to close his palm upon the entirety of his young windpipe, a downward thrust. In contrast--the man-cum-deity-cum-abomination that was practically now hauling him out of the stool knew full-well what he was doing, pressure from a    
  
[ _ huge _ ]   
  
hand to the sides of his throat, both imprinting into his pulse, and slowly cutting away air.   
  
Monaghan’s eyes rolled back, partway, before he could stop them, but he didn’t stop the wispy moan, or the laugh that followed.    
  
“Finally gonna ditch humanity for--hhh,  _ fuck _ ...for the chiral exaltation?”   
  
Could Cliff leave all of that behind? There were so many hints that he would never fully slight his goodness. But there was potential in the pudding, if only they could season it further.    
  
Funny, Higgs thought, how he could swerve through the full curve of a one hundred and eighty degree angle. Extinction to preservation, if only of the self, and all because of the existence of a strange man on a shore. But he wasn’t finished yet. This story didn’t end here. He had another couple of quarters to shove in the machine.   
  
\--   
  
_ She’d scared it out of hiding. Not intentionally. She wasn’t the kind to do that, but...it’d bolted. She’d stricken it with the car, and now, the young, foolish thing was laying by the wayside with little elsewhere to go. _ _   
_ _   
_ \--   
  
Tighter, in protest to whatever he had to say. Tighter, in annoyance, the way the Captain’s chin lifted. Didn’t stop Higgs from softly choking out, “Your shadow’s showing,” which caused the final drag of the other out of his seat.    
  
Halfway on the haphazard cot now, halfway off of it, as Clifford wrenched the air out of him. As he brought smart remarks to a minimum, and as his other hand seemed to wrench something down below on his own person, thumbing metal and leather. Not nylon, as most other modern military wear seemed to be. Out of regs--but what did it matter? From what Monaghan had heard, this guy had fought on twelve or more separate fronts in his own personal purgatory, over and over, searching for the little child that had built the bridge. He had no right to pick and choose the guy’s choice of paraphernalia--   
  
And besides. The smell. The fucking smell of animal flesh, toned and dyed and put into an accessory to a garment that he was more familiar with than he’d like to admit   
  
[More scared of than he’d like to admit.]   
  
and it caused him to issue a harsh, reedy whine as it was lashed about his throat to replace the hand. Implements. They all loved them.   
  
Cliff was over him, half-straddling the man beneath him, keeping him neatly, if somewhat dangerously leashed. His other hand clamped over the splint as a warning. No escape. He leaned down, and cast shade over his lesser, his peon, this ant beneath him. At last, his own mouth spread, showing the dominant bearing of ivory, the traces of chiralium within stinging at the edges of Higgs’s eyes--but he couldn’t look away.   
  
When he spoke, when he at last responded, Higgs wanted to scream.   
  
[Your shadow’s showing.]   
  
“ _ So is yours _ .”   
  
\--   
  
_ It had been breathing so hard. Its eyes...so wide. He’d never seen blood in a beast’s eye before. _ _   
_ _   
_ \--   
  


No scream came. The belt instead, drew thick and tight, both palm and fingers. Palm AND fingers, why had he never considered--the idiotic thought breezed through his mind, even as one long leg kicked, lashed out. Was this the second in a series of follies, where he ended up subjugated beneath the eldritch, beneath the fable kicked into his teeth through bold repetition and constant scolding? Had the devil been in the storm, in the details, all along, and he’d kept his distance too long?    
  
Yet.   
  
Yet…   
  
Even as his brain cells dulled due to starvation, he could at least note one thing. One increasingly obvious thing.   
  
Unger enjoyed this. Maybe he had all along. Maybe he’d gauged him wrong, and he’d been sick even in the confines of his mortality. But he absolutely was doing so now.   
  


And, oh, he knew. He knew, the purpling of his flesh, the clothing of blood in its insistence to bruise, the vessels in his very  _ eyes _ that he could feel burst, and burst bright red to contrast the hissing, keen silver in his irises.   
  
\--   
  
_ Young. Too young, for this sort of thing. He’d seen too many go, too young. But it made it easier, to plant his boot on the neck, to take its head… _   
  
\--

Higgs knew he was the prettiest fucking sight Clifford Unger had ever seen. And in spite of the belt around his neck, in contempt of the panic that so held his body, he forced his spit-frothed lips to meet the Captain’s in a frenzy that was strangely met, rather than rejected. A first kiss, a commune, a promise. A threat.

And when Unger’s teeth found his bottom lip, and white knuckles pulled the leather strap tighter...Higgs twisted his hips. Let the unmistakable length of a thigh grace what he knew full well lay locked and loaded between the shuyet’s own. 

Thicker than he thought, and stirring. The war raged, but this battle could be his. 

If he could  _ just _ …   
  
\--   
  
_ Higgs Monaghan felt nearly as fragile. _ _   
_ _   
_ \--   
  
A blackout. He’d lost consciousness. In a panic, Higgs, tried to gain his bearings, gulped in what little air he was allowed, tried to sit up, but was forced down again by a pull of the belt, by the cinched length of it. Still on the bed. Still in the hut. Still under Cliff. Still in hell.   
  
His hands lifted to claw in agony at the man above, only now registering what was between them. The other hand had extracted his shameful erection. Encircled it. But not  _ just _ it.   
  
Clifford was of average length, uncut, which was what Higgs had anticipated, but what he hadn’t considered was the thickness of him, the way his cock sawed to the left, just so, the prominent vein that throbbed, that seemed to beat with a life of its own along the underside. And dripping from the tip, a slick droplet, a gem of pre-spending, drooling down to touch at the terrorist’s sex beneath.   
  
It was black.   
  
Though tar wasn’t streaking his face, it came from below as well. Corrupted without as much as within.   
  
[as above--]   
  
\--   
  
_ A pathetic display. With either his hands, or a hanging, he could end him. Grant him mercy. Watch his breath sing the final exhale. It would be so quick. So easy. And then they’d both know peace. _ _   
_ _   
_ \--   
  
He stroked them both fervently, not caring about either of their clothing. And who would? Higgs was a filthy wretch at this point, bathed in saltwater and slime. Unger’s didn’t even exist, if Unger himself did.    
  
If he was a mirage in an undeserved oasis, he definitely felt real. The pulse of him, rabbiting through the flushed skin of his sex, reverberating into Monaghan’s own. Whatever blackness roiled within this ghastly play on Edmond Dantes also pushed heat into Higgs, incandescent even through that singular point of contact.   
  
He was allowed one breath. Denied several others. Stars encroached on his vision again, even as climax neared, beyond his grasp or his control.   
  
\--   
  
_ But then the thought came: _   
  
\--   
  
The pace increased. Cliff’s other hand joined the belt, giving up its grasp for the preference of his fingers, though it still remained looped around a rapidly bruising neck. It felt like his windpipe would collapse any moment. He’d be a fish out of water, a ship sunk. He’d be gone. Dead and gone.   
  
Higgs was crying again, this he only realized now, as he stared into the sky above, and then into Unger’s eyes as he was forced into another smothering, this time with the man’s own mouth.   
  
\--   
  
**_Why would he ever spare mercy for the agent of Bridget and Amelie Strand?_ ** _   
_ _   
_ \--   
  
As soon as he found what could be mistaken for bliss, Cliff released him. Let him have his orgasm, but not the fulfilment of it, the younger man’s cock oozing a few weak spurts, in contrast to the attention he gave himself. The Captain snarled into the open cavern of Monaghan’s mouth, as he finished himself, came over belly and groin, used his hand to besmirch him with seed. Mark him. Let that blackened, ruined fluid seep in, just as it had on the grassy hill. He spread it over his throat, next to ugly bruising, smeared it as ink upon his cheek.    
  
Higgs was allowed to breathe now. But he couldn’t. Panic swelled up in his chest, and his lungs followed suit, only making room for so much air, nostrils pumping out breath at a rapid pace.   
  
Unger seemed to relax at an unnatural pace. Suddenly, he was calm, not the thing that had executed another dominion over the terrorist. He didn’t entirely soften. Stony gaze met weeping eyes, and he sighed into the man’s lips. Never had he broken the kiss.   
  
Higgs’s nostrils were pinched shut, suddenly reminiscent of their first bodily collision. More anxiety hiked in the brunette’s system, but it was quickly quashed as he recognized, faintly, what was being done to him.   
  
Breath was taken in through Clifford’s own nose. Drawn in. Exhaled into the younger man’s lungs at a reasonable pace. This process was repeated, almost a sort of CPR, a reminder of the slow rhythm that was necessary to retain life, that was the norm. The stasis. It was oddly calming, and though Higgs occasionally hiccupped through his tears, he managed to breathe with Cliff. Through Cliff. For Cliff.   
  
When the Captain felt the curl of a smile against his lips, he stopped, reminding the other that he could still take away his air, even in such a gentle system. There was no control to be had, for the man below. And he had to be fine with that.   
  
His lips were reddened, when they parted. As were Higgs’s. And his infatuations doubled. His curiosity piqued. The abuse had him trembling, but more willing to worship than ever.   
  
Unger watched him stayed above him for several more moments, taking the sight in of the wordless, fucked-out mess beneath him. It was shameful, considering he hadn’t even gotten fucked. But a compact had been signed now. Theory? Check. Permission? Check. A plan...Now there was the fulcrum that would impact them both. There had to be some secret, some way he’d been repeatedly ripped from the Beach to pester and/or bring about the demise of Sam Bridges.   
  
Higgs would find it. He had opportunity now.   
  
Though whatever doubt he had doubled, as Cliff tucked himself back into his slacks, and held out a demanding hand, rising up to sit on his haunches above him, a towering monolith.    
  
“Hand me your knife. Now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by the CAH card: Daddy’s Belt 
> 
> Next chapter includes postulating and discipline, sex is in flux, we’ll see.
> 
> Find me on Twitter @clint_theo_leo


	4. mend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A mending before a break.

The knife.   
  
It took a long, gasping moment for Higgs to even register the thought.   
  
The knife…   
  
[ _ THAT _ knife.]   
  
Such things were incredible tools. Weapons, in a pinch. And oh, that little crooked blade had seen its share of pinches, of lives punctured and mutilated, blood drawn to sate the earth and sage it for the arrival of the impeccable Amelie, the Extinction, the end.   
  
Its humble beginnings did indeed foreshadow its last use, the fight against Sam. But the first had seen success. The final had seen failure. Seemed appropriate, after all, considering his situation. There had been days, when he’d been waiting for Cliff to show up, that he’d considered its applications concerning his own throat. But….he wasn’t a fucking coward.   
  
Besides, they’d bargained. They’d talked.  _ Cliff believed him. _   
  
**So why the fuck was he asking for the knife?**   
  
For the first time since their surreal meeting, the humor in Higgs’s expression finally fled, and he stared, with wide silver in his eyes, with tears streaking his cheeks, with an embarrassing amount of his own spending still wet on his clothes. And he whispered, “No.”   
  
And it was nearly worth it. Nearly, for the way that Unger stared back, in confounded disbelief. The way his brow furrowed, the way his lower lip seemed to draw in a little tighter. The expression could nearly fool someone into believing he was human, in any way. But of course, the truth was well known to his new sole acolyte--he was anything but, this bizarre specter, this apparition given flesh.   
  
Cliff rose up partway, though he still shadowed the supine man beneath him, and gave the slightest sigh, not through his mouth, but a soft, nearly bestial flare of his nostrils. He lifted one hand and held it, palm up, very close to the younger’s chest.   
  
“I can take it away forcibly if you prefer. Or just pull whatever I can get from the war. Your choice.”   
  
Monaghan had seen cruelty manifest in this man, in a fashion that he’d never anticipated, and he didn’t have an  _ immediate _ desire to see what rusty bit of steel would be brought through to probably slide into his heart. That was the most likely motivation behind how his good hand moved, slid the little knife from its sheath, and held it up where it was in perfect access to the Captain.   
  
A smile. A smile, too fucking warm. Too sly.    
  
[He loved it.]   
  
“Good boy.”   
  
Dear  _ fucking God _ , he hoped the other man hadn’t glanced down to see how two specific words could make his cock twitch. Or maybe he wished he would. Whatever the case was, he found himself temporarily stun-locked, swallowing an encroaching groan, and saving him some mild embarrassment in the process.   
  
The terrorist missed, almost entirely, the way the veteran had shucked away the temporary splint he’d assembled around his ruined wrist. But he caught it a few moments after--and that caused his reforming jackal grin to falter, if only by a fraction.   
  
“...You’re not really considerin’ loppin’ that thing off, are you?”    
  
Higgs was plain, but careful, in the manner he asked.   
  
“Because, y’know, this whole Gettin’ Us Off The Fuckin’ Beach ordeal is gonna be way easier if I have access to both of my ha--”   
  
“Enough.”   
  
The gilded tip of the blade, placed neat at the point of Higgs’s chin, made its point. For now, he closed his lips. Settled. Shut up. It drew the slightest bead of red, a little bud that rested amongst his stubble, as Cliff then removed the pinprick. 

Instead, the veteran shifted himself. He leaned down partway. Squinted in the half-light of the tent. The guy could have summoned a flashlight from somewhere in Vietnam or Afghanistan, Higgs mused, but instead, he chose to squint in the shadows at the mangled remains of his wrist. That...that was human too. And incredibly so. 

This thought passed away as quickly as it came, because then the knife was moved to the bruised, ruined flesh of his healing wrist. 

And though the eyes that met his were the warm ones, the soft ones, the Cliff that bargained, the implication of his words felt a bit worrying. 

“Do you need something to bite down on?”

Regret tinged each syllable, and with a little snort, Monaghan gathered every ounce of pith he possessed to spit a sarcasm-laden response. 

He never got it out. 

Instead his teeth gritted and ground, his hand pinned by a strategic placement of Unger’s free forearm, when the knife bit into epidermis, then dermis, then deep deep deep into muscle, and the hollow where his massacred bones lay.

Blood welled. Gushed. But didn’t spit. The man did well to ignore any major nerves or veins or arteries. And how  _ fucking strange  _ was that, to consider it a blessing?

His starved amity recognized it, and he laughed, laughed through the pain, hardly noticing the saliva that welled in his mouth, that spilled from the fullness of his bottom lip. 

Were he to bleed out now, at least he’d gotten a chuckle out of it. 

Monaghan had to wonder, through the quickened but unceasing thump of his pulse, if he had some similar effect on Cliff—concerning the oral secretions. For as his own had filled, so too did the slick darkness that now touched at the back of the pink line of his mouth, seeming to seep into the very lines that contoured that flesh. 

Higgs fixated on them, on the effect that seemed like a glossing of the elder man’s mouth, a strange sort of paint that almost demanded him to be still. To watch. To listen. How he loathed it. More, how he loathed wanting more of it. 

Subjugation had never been the objective. Worship was a means of elevation, after all—a ladder to climb, a mirror to look into and eventually assume the image of. Why then, allow this man, to hold him tight and ruin him, over and over again? 

In the realm of flesh and blood and fucking there hadn’t been weight, not gifted with repatriation as Higgs had been. Being trod upon was folly. It was a Saturday night activity, shot up with a cocktail of acids and bases to make him feel alive, demanding six of the h. demens at once, then slaughtering them mercilessly for fodder after. 

Here, there was no rewind and try again. 

He was on his last man. 

And he was bleeding, looking into the mirror, and trying to decide on whether he’d join or kill this man in the end, or climb him. If he could even  **be** killed. 

He’d always said 

[never again]

he wouldn’t look back, but he felt reduced to the wondering child again, eyes full of wonder and dripping with tears, as he watched Clifford Unger bend his face down low. He felt his adolescence surge through him, however, as the man extended his tongue, opened his mouth…

And let the tar slide from the organ, into the bleeding channels he’d created. 

Oh.  _ Oh _ . That was strange. The way the fluid defied time, the way it snapped on to whatever forsaken slivers of bone remained, and formed them slow-but-fast into usable rigidity. 

Stranger still, the way Cliff’s eyes regarded him the whole time, unblinking. 

If he wasn’t still recuperating from their dalliance in strangulation, his dick would have jolted to attention. As things were, bleeding, with onyx tears weeping down his cheeks, the most he could do was hiss out a whine that was given more breath than voice. Weak, in comparison to earlier laughter. 

Channels filled, bone...remade? Gilded. Gold. Like the crystals that rose from the snow and the fog, latched into a sea of red pain. 

Tingly. 

So much so, that it caused his fingers to twitch and spasm, a recalibration of their broken spirits with the rest of his arm. 

Wonder had returned, as had his laugh, though this one was...considerably more weepy. The other hand, the one not under assault, feebly smeared the ink that spilled beneath one eye with the swipe of a thumb. 

“Well. H-Hot damn, pops, you got a touch. Anyone ever tell you, you should be a doctor? How’s your handwritin’?”

Shitty stand up humor aside, Cliff was reiterating his own actions, but the swipe his hand made was at his lips and chin. He was a mess now, that oily slick of sweat upon him, causing a shimmer that seemed to make the tattooing on his chest and arms dance. “I’m terrible with field medicine.”

A snort here, derisive and caricaturing. “Coulda fooled me.”

Unger regarded that, his nose giving that singular, signature twitch. During their odd courtship, their bond-forging, it was pretty easy for Higgs to pick up that it meant annoyance. 

With some care, the younger man sat up, if only partway. Yet...the Captain kept his wrist. 

“Don’t move. You’re still bleeding.”

With some deranged detachment, the ex-terrorist looked over the Almighty Miracle Wrist, the Forearm of Fury. “...Had worse.”

Clifford then, the mirage in the desert, shimmering and searing like overheated tarmac, slowly closed his hand over the two wounds he’d created and the bony crystals therein. And, true to form, he gripped, and squeezed. And suddenly, “having worse” took on a new definition and precedent. 

Unger burned. Or—at least his hand did. 

Higgs’s eyes went wide, as the wound was forcibly cauterized. Blessing and curse conjoined, and he formed a scream, suddenly sat bolt upright in dismay, and fear, and re-found rage. 

The earlier, forgotten query

[Do you need something to bite down on?]

was suddenly remembered, and yes.  **Yes** , he needed to tear and rend flesh, to find someone’s blood with his teeth. 

Days, maybe weeks before, when Cliff had soaked him through, the other man had laid a bite into his throat that had sadly faded in too little time. He repaid the favor now, mouth agape, latching tightly into the skin of the man who was and was not there. 

The Captain’s shoulders tensed, and then rolled. Never did they wholly relax—they never truly did, even at his most sane. But they seemed...particularly set in a frame, with a wretch’s teeth set in his solid and immovable pulse. 

One. Two. One and two. The perfect beat, the call to war. Blood to blood, exchanged one man to another, like the indulgent birth of a fledgling vampire. Man to man. God to God, if Higgs could so hope. 

A small amount of Cliff’s blood, or whatever replaced it, slipped in through minute punctures, and it tasted of the same chiral metal gunk that had choked his lungs, sopped through with seawater, mildly gritty with sand. Or perhaps ash. It was hot, the coffee you hadn’t let sit long enough before taking a sip. But it took his mind off of the branding he endured at the end of his arm. 

So much so that he didn’t realize when it was over. 

His wound was closed. And though his skin burned, it was...a clean thing. A healing thing. Not a sore and rotting pound of flesh. And the form of Unger’s hand, the very lines of his palm, burned into his flesh…

Beautiful, in their own way. 

At least, from where he could see. 

“Are you finished?”

The strain, the very mild discomfort in the veteran’s tone was the only thing that called Higgs back to his mind, to his mouth, still latched right where stubble ended and throat joined. 

A slight smirk, and a shudder. He tensed his jaw to tighten the bite at first, earning him a light cuffing from Clifford’s knuckles. Then he released, and drew back enough that he could sit up on his own. 

An examination was due. His flesh. The redness. The more focused burn close to the singed-shut lines, almost as if Cliff’s palm was a precision instrument. And maybe it was, in its own mysterious, terrible way. 

The ogling was short lived, as the ex-soldier tugged his hand back by his fingers, and began dutifully, it loosely, wrapping the burn in bandages from...well, whatever “somewhere” the man usually obtained his wares from. But they were clean, and he seemed to know how to dress an injury well enough. 

“How’d you learn that trick?”

Weathered, coarse hands paused in their work for a single second, and then continued. “I didn’t.”

“Mmkay.” He sniffled back another tear of pain, more of of inconvenience than embarrassment. “How’d you know it’d work?”

Déjà vu. A gambling man.

“I didn’t.”

—

“There’s always a storm.”

They had been over this. Still, it was nice to have the conversation, a break in an otherwise silent world. 

And now, they walked. 

Clifford had pulled the jacket to his fatigues back on, which Higgs found somewhat disappointing, in an inquisitive way. The toned arms weren’t on view any more, though there was still a hint of that chest where the jacket remained open, displaying greying curls. More importantly, it displayed a bit of that ink, the tattooing that had him curious. Fields of poppies and ravenous wolves. Had they looked the same in life? Bold? Brash? Yearning to leap off of his skin for the kill? Or, like the rest of him...had they been softer?

Their ambling gait was slow enough for him to stare and fathom. And Unger didn’t particularly seem to care. Though he did notice, in the way his eyes flitted from Higgs’s gawking face, back to the void. 

Eventually, the subject came back. 

“Yeah yeah, the supercells, right? Nasty lookin’ shit.”

They paused, but only so Cliff could take out a worn little paper pouch of tobacco. His fingers managed some surprising deftness, as he walked, as he rolled a cigarette without even having to stop again. 

“Nasty is...right.  _ Very  _ nasty. I don’t remember much, until the end of it, and I’m back here. The memories come later, in waves. But I know I’m somewhere  _ more than the beach _ .”

“Bridges comms said somethin’ about a combined beach. War trauma.”

Now, they’d stopped again. Now, his eyes were ablaze, that specter. And dark. All at once. Almost...black, past the reach of his irises. 

“Bridges.”

Higgs held up his hands, the bandaged arm not coming up as far. “Hey now. You know for a fact I ain’t got my dick in that pie. Hacked ‘em.”

Cliff stared, but seemed content, if slightly wary with the response. He put the cigarette between his lips, and then did a strange thing. 

He started rolling another. 

“It’s more than that. It’s a...transit. Going through that place took me where I needed to go. To find……..Mmh.”

He closed his eyes, and the brand between his lips lit without another thought, even as his greyed brow furrowed in frustration at the shattering of his psyche. 

Sam Bridges.

[ _ Him _ .  **Fuck** that guy.]

Higgs had been chewing on his tongue, a realization that didn’t come until Unger was turning, angling and lifting his head just so, pressing a cigarette of his own between the taller terrorist’s lips this time, and lighting it with the one he was already dragging on. 

His nostrils flared, drank in the scent of tired, and wild, and dead. Cliff. Cliff. Cliff. 

His hands wound slowly into the jacket fabric. The one that blocked his view, as he sucked in minimal nicotine from a shitty cigarette, hand-rolled with stale tobacco that probably didn’t exist. 

They stayed like that, a moment, a tic in time that might have been a week on the Earth’s surface. It wasn’t a waste. 

“So you gotta be called.” At last, Higgs drawled it out, let his lithe, strong chest heave it, though it was more quiet than anticipated.

“The storm has to come.”

“Then I got good news, pops.”

Could he still manage the power, severed as he was? It was a stretch to teleport. A pain to pull upon the godly abilities granted the fulcrum of the Particle. He’d given the world mass, and Amelie and Sam had ripped him away from his finest of creations, only to drop him in the lap of something potent and unintentional. Something useful. Something defiant. Someone. 

He leaned in close, and the words, the formulas etched in his skin, on his forehead nudged same, unmarred flesh of Unger’s, as if he could meld intent with him in this physical way. 

“You got scattered in the desert, cut apart and dethroned, but I’ve come to stitch you back together. You ain’t gotta look for him any more. I’ve got your storm right here.”

Memories of ozone burning, ripped apart by thunder he’d called down with his very hands. The Earth wouldn’t be so far away. He could smell it now, and he knew Cliff could as well, from the way the man’s head jerked backward.

“ _ I am the storm _ .”

Nostril twitch. Annoyed. Probably at the proximity. Funny, that, but he still let Higgs’s hands stay in his top, pulling camouflage away, just slightly, from inked-up shoulders.

“...Osiris.”

“Ayup.”

“Cute.”

“Ain’t I just?”

“Hmph.” And there was just the hint of that earlier smile, below the smoke in his nostrils. Hazelnut gaze noted the hands yet upon him, and he issued a snort, a most flawed and human sound. “You like the tattoos.”

Higgs played an ace, a little boldness. Stepped in. “You like flowers.”

Unger’s hands came up at last and looped loose around the terrorist’s wrists. “Ironically, they stand for remembrance.” He flipped one of those arms with a forceful wrench, luckily the unhurt one. The hand-poked, shitty cartouche was then on display, careful symbols with wavering lines. “What’s that mean?”

It would have been easy to lie. Archaeologists mistook the wording on such things fairly often at their first discovery. 

The oval, knotted at one end, the strand severed and tied. He couldn’t bury that person, so carving their royal name into his skin had to do the trick. Dead and gone. 

“It’s my name.”

“Higgs?”

“...No.”

The truth sometimes left them guessing more than a fabrication, and fuck, he decided he liked watching Cliff calculate, especially with tobacco drooping from his lips. “...You’re not going to tell me.”

He wrenched his teeth out in another wide smile. “Nope.”

There was a spike, in the air around them. For a moment, Monaghan wondered if he’d be interrogated over something so trivial. Instead, Unger shook him off, and Higgs allowed him to. 

The terrorist took the smoke from his lips, and exhaled a plume of the stuff into the air. He would be the storm. He’d carry the shuyet to the war zone. They could both see it coming together. 

Possibility was on the horizon. A future. A kindling of a most useful relationship, until Monaghan could make it out to the world and rule as he’d been meant to from the beginning, without Amelie’s ruthless and tedious leash. 

Cliff was looking out over the blackened sea. 

“Did they find him? All of him?”

A different question than Higgs had expected. 

“Mmh?”

“Osiris.”

“Oh. Uh,  _ almost _ .”

“What did he lack?”

“His cock. Eaten by a crocodile.”

Those brown eyes shot him quite a look. 

“Don’t worry, Daddy. You ain’t gotta worry ‘bout that part, huh?”

The space where Unger had been was quite suddenly vacant. 

He’d be back. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soft? Kind of I guess? Bonding. 
> 
> I’ll elaborate more on the knife later, and there will be gross in the next chapter, from Cliff’s POV primarily. Getting into dead dove territory soon.
> 
> Everyone likes an Osiris’s weenie joke.


	5. bond

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How do you walk in the dark without getting lost?

Sometimes, when the wind whipped outside, as it howled some ancient melody his ears were deafened to, he’d hold his hands up. Interlock them, just so, fingers laced with fingers. The standard-issue lantern above his head would sway with the fabric of the tent, the sole light in the dark. 

He’d hold his war-weathered hands up, smeared with gun oil and the remnants of sweat, and he’d see just how the vividness, how the rays of light would pinken and percolate through his flesh. 

Eyes focused, razor sharp and keen as any blade, he’d pull his hands down. Slow, and as they descended, he’d allow his fingers to part. 

Cracks of light. Disjointed. 

He forced his eyes not to focus on them, on the surge of manufactured brightness. He’d gaze through his hands, and try to see beyond it. Before it. But never use what was burning brightest as his focus. The subtleties sang, and he saw everything, and nothing, and sometimes, when the alternative was the ricochet of bullets, or worse, that peculiar wet  _ thump _ of their contact with human flesh...nothing was better. 

Nothing was best. 

But the light was there. It was blinding. And whatever was behind it was important, or it could be. He had to train his gaze, in this subtle, stupid manner. 

His men had nearly stepped into a grenade in days previous because he’d had a blind spot. 

Never again. 

Never fucking again. 

—

Days churned, in and out. He watched their passing through a haze of cigarette smoke. He watched the roll of clouds he knew not to be real, or...at least real in the manner that he’d been accustomed to. Rain. Fog. Never snow. 

He missed snow. 

The microcosm was his, except when it wasn’t, when he was dragged into hell. When he forgot everything and anything, when he became that…

Thing. 

Reflection, in a pool of water. Hard to see past the light. And if the sea could just stop moving, if the lap of the waves would cease a moment and calm, perhaps he could focus. 

The clouds would move, and on time went. 

At least now, he had company. 

More pertinent to the point, he had  **hope** . 

If Higgs Monaghan could be considered “hope.”

A disaster of a human being, a broken down mongrel. He’d seen him before, in his occasional inquests with Amelie, usually nothing more than the handing over of a shopping list—however metaphorical—before he was off to cause more trouble. He and the boy hadn’t truly collided until after. But here they were. 

Soldier and storm. Could lightning be caught in a bottle? Or was it too manic to hold in one’s hand?

“You hearin’ me, old man, or did your ears get fucked off and away by your shuyet as well?”

The present hauled him out of reverie and back to the stand of trees. His back against real-not-real bark. The top to his fatigues was off today, granting him a far more casual air, and exposing his tattoos, which upon occasion seemed to seep glittering, black chiral tar. Old wounds opened. 

Cliff’s eyes tracked back over to the younger man, to his angular face, graced upon its lower apex with a charming swipe of facial hair, and those too-sharp teeth. Had he been one of his men during wartime, he might have found him...alluring. In a distressing way. In a dangerous way. In a manner he didn’t particularly want to consider.   
  
But he did, anyway, as visions of him, sprawled on his cot, his arm fucked over and his cum smeared on his person, mingling with the boy’s own waste.   
  
Life had a funny way of dragging him back into his indulgences--even more so now that he was damned to the purgatory of not-life.   
  
“I heard you.”    
  
Higgs gestured idly with whatever hunk of dry bread and meat constituted a poor sandwich. Occasionally, Cliff would pull these things for him. It wasn’t ever...completely denoted whether or not it was actually necessary. But he was trapped here with Ha intact, and perhaps it was better to treat his key to the physical world with sustenance, if only every now and then.    
  
Hazelnut eyes found the mostly-healed wrist he’d mangled in earlier lust and unbridled rage. He...he owed him that much. Right?   
  
[You owe him  _ nothing _ .]   
  
Not that he had access to much. This beach was empty aside from the rotting corpses of sea life that were hardly palatable, and the stretch of his own afterlife was conjoined with the screams of dead soldiers, lamenting their eternal doom in a battle that would never cease. Still, there were rations in the field, like the one Higgs presently held.   
  
Luckily he didn’t seem...particularly  **picky** about what went in him.   
  
That thought made the corner of Cliff’s mouth twitch. He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t comment.   
  
He  _ did _ feel an ache at the very end of his spine that echoed in the sickness of his gut.   
  
“You were talking about crossing the battlefield. My beach. Our...our beach.” Normal speech resumed, and he tapped at the mark of the cross on his stomach, though it yet lay beneath his undershirt, in reference to the dead men that attached to him when he was on the prowl. “Can you be certain you’ll be crossing through with  _ me _ , though?”   
  
At that, Higgs seemed to pause, tapped his pinky finger on the sandwich he held. Never was the man at rest. Every last, false-gilded part of him had to be moving, and so he shifted, nearly squirmed, with an aberration to him that couldn’t be named. He swallowed. He spoke, those silver-and-blue eyes lifted to mirror silver-and-blue sky. “Does it matter? He’s still you. Part of you, anyway--no matter how much that idea sets your jaw, pops.”   
  
The terrorist had been reaching over to knock his bare knuckles on Unger’s jaw as a means of illustration. He swatted them away, gentle and tired, with a sigh, and Higgs chuckled.    
  
The soldier sat back further against the tree, and his boots crossed at the ankles. “That doesn’t sound productive. Battle calls for a clear head.”   
  
“You ain’t exactly at war any more.”   
  
“Easy for you to say.” His perception shifted sideways a few degrees. Past Higgs. As if Bridget or Amelie would stand there any moment, watching him with those sad, unfortunate eyes. Poor thing, she’d say. Poor thing, with his very child cradled in her fucking arms, turning and walking away to leave him out at sea.   
  
Eyes left. Higgs Monaghan, watching him with a befuddled crease of brow and a bemused smile, the cat’s grin that never quite left him, even when he was screaming in agony. Cheshire in spirit, washed in by the tide. Cliff was never completely sure if he could be trusted, but that...that was almost refreshing. At least this man was clearly volatile, instead of a viper waiting in the long grass. Named for the particle of god, the mass of the unexpected--but at least he could anticipate chaos from him.   
  
Always.   
  
“It’ll be tough. Ain’t gonna deny that. It’ll be a right pain in the ass. But what else are we gonna do, old man? Sit on the beach eating MREs til time stops? Seems like a shitty hand. I’m offerin’ you an anchor while you’re tossed out here. A tether. Maybe keep you sane while you’re shootin’ porters in a storm.”   
  
A tether.   
  
The earlier talk, as well as those words, had him unconsciously tracing his stomach, the tightness of his abdomen beneath. Scar. The scar, the unwilling hole in him.   
  
Higgs Monaghan.   
  
A tether.   
  
His spine twitched again, but this time, it was from beyond, was that part of his soul that he had taken to loathing, the shade in him.    
  
He could hold skeletal men in thrall, could pull them out of death’s grasp and use them to combat the living. But could the living be held in the same way? Could he use Higgs as a metaphorical anchor point, tie him, use him? After all, the terrorist almost certainly intended to use Unger. There was no attachment, aside from the man’s fetish for power and his alignment with it, was there?   
  
Cliff was grasping his own shirt. Tight, knuckles white. Monaghan cleared his throat.   
  
“Shitty sandwich for your thoughts?”   
  
He met his eyes, and the shuyet smiled, faintly, at how, for  _ some reason _ , Higgs paled. Just a bit. Just noticeable.   
  
“I have a theory, Higgs.”   
  
“...I just bet you do.”   
  
The grip of his hand slowly relaxed, in concert with an exhale that came notably from his belly, his diaphragm releasing to allow the escape of so much air. Something told him that the other wasn’t going to care for this much. But duty and deification called for prostration from time to time. If Higgs was going to hold him as monolith and savior, he had to be willing to pay. Amelie’s bishop had been called to court, and now he had to stand and deliver homage before the king.   
  
“Let me leash you.”    
  
When Clifford uttered these words, they sounded less a beckoning call, more a threat. A demand, a command uttered from the mouth of something he didn’t possess. He rolled his shoulders, and waved his hand, and Higgs didn’t move a single inch.   
  
There they remained, for several moments, for several seconds suspended in their time, a time that didn’t exist. He swore he could hear a heartbeat. He swore he could feel it, just beneath his tongue. Not his. Not his. But soon.   
  
When Clifford surged forward, it was met with resistance, and that was expected. He’d have thought things strange without it, without the grunt, without the briefest of scowls hidden behind that smile. His fist reared, and when it came down, it bludgeoned the side of Monaghan’s jaw, with a snapping sound that was utterly satisfactory, a further crack as the man’s skull collided with the other tree opposite his own.   
  
Violence their common tongue, Higgs bit back. One long leg lifted, sought out the crosshairs on Unger’s gut, met with hardened abdominal tissue--both scar and muscle. It pulled a grunt, made the soldier hiss out a breath that wasn’t, as it was difficult to reconcile his bodily affiliations with his spiritual, ascended being. But he pressed into it, tried to connect his forehead with the other’s in a vicious headbutt.    
  
The first cracked into Higgs’s face, and a gutteral cry sounded with the second crack, this time the splitting of the man’s nose, the sudden gush of red red blood quickening whatever cadence he’d felt before. He pulled back. Tried for another.   
  
To his credit, the terrorist  **did** manage to fist his long fingers in Cliff’s hair, and held him at bay, wrenched his head back.    
  
How he must have looked.   
  
And he could see, to some degree, in the argentate shine of the other man’s gaze; mirror mirror day in and day out, slick with the unbidden tears of pain that had come from the breaking of his gorgeous fucking face. He could see his own reflection, a visage of power, Ozymandias in the desert, but alive and well and atop his new gilded pedestal, his face painted in lines of black as his nature surfaced. Osiris, come calling for vengeance.   
  
Pained, yet somehow still sarcastic, the voice that rang out, mildly nasal from the bleed. “There some point to this, Daddy, ‘cause my patience for these injuries ain’t exactly--”   
  
Much as the molecular fucking he’d given Higgs on earlier collision, the umbilical cord that snuck out from that singular permanent wound in his gut latched onto the other, forced its way up under his shirt, and burnt its way into the back of his neck.   
  
Never had he heard such a shriek, a ululation like the one that wound its way out of the man’s throat. Into his nervous system, into his thoughts, his feelings. It was a wild, uncharted territory, and as he tapped into everything that composed this utter wretch that he was pressing within, he sank forward, Higgs hand having released him almost instantaneously. He hummed, and the hum was a lower sound than he was used to emitting, a thing that seemed to shake the earth, and whatever lay below. A whale’s song, if the whale had a smoker’s grit, and the predatory gaze of a man alight with newfound potential.   
  
He could see things. Hear things, that would be sorted through later.    
  
[A pathetic childhood. Maps splayed on tables. The same glittering knife. Men with leering faces, a methodic spread of old friends’ bones, the impact of fist upon fist upon  _ fist upon fist  _ **_upon_ ** ]   
  
He knew full-well all of this could be felt in the twisted library of Higgs’s psyche, and he felt him attempt to wrench away in panic.   
  
Their sync wasn’t complete. The leash hadn’t taken.    
  
_ He wasn’t finished. _   
  
Though one grasp was still entangled in the casual clothing they’d been conversing in, the other one didn’t seek to restrain. One point of stoppage would be enough to keep him in place, but something else was required to keep him enthralled.    
  
A casual hand knocked aside the cartouche-imbedded forearm, and reached for intimidation instead.   
  
Though antiquated in many respects, the Beretta M9 had remained his constant companion as a sidearm. It was a wonder, in their various encounters, that the thing hadn’t found its way into his hand.   
  
Until now.    
  
Its comfortable weight pressed, with authority, beneath that scruff, that stubble Monaghan passed with confidence as a beard. Just above, he could see the tiny mark where the man’s own knife had kissed his skin in days previous. The muzzle graced it with less delicacy, hounding upon the flesh, making the man bare his throat the same as his gritted teeth. Blood mingled with spit, mingled with the drool of their mutual encounter, the same tarry spittle rising in his own mouth, albeit at a sluggish rate.    
  
Unger didn’t speak. Not for these few moments, as he attempted to join them, grasping through living cellular structure. Not as his own memory rutted up against those sad little anecdotes the other possessed.   
  
[Deep notes of baking bread coupled with a parental argument in his native tongue. The smell of fading roses caught in perfect, unmoving blonde hair. A man’s eyes,  **dark** and  _ perfect _ and  **_full_ ** , sodden with earned trust.]   
  
He didn’t speak, instead dragging the gun up over the surface of that chin. Touched at his cheek, dragging blood over skin, painting through borders and trails of black. Nudging his broken nose and earning a snort.   
  
He nearly chipped a few teeth when he took advantage of his gaping mouth, and shoved the weapon in. Sideways. Not with the precision and care of a trained killer. This was wanton. This was lust. This was power, and now he was finally beginning to understand why Higgs strained so hard in an attempt to possess it.    
  
_ But it was so easy. _   
  
Through the fumbling, through his obvious virgin awkwardness to violating a living creature in this precise fashion, came the thrill of being able to do it first try.    
  
The pleasure that came across his face this time was apparent. It showed in the mirror, where he yet stared, and it showed in the way the terrorist choked and moaned and tried to throw his body up against his in an entirely different fashion. No visible collar. But the leash was fastening. And that mouth, that accepting mouth, perhaps embarrassed by its whorish cooperation, tightened around the weapon.   
  
Unger twitched. The second of his tendrils emerged, and this one was more intimate, laving over his own clothed cock as he shoved the gun deeper, and  _ twisted _ it until it was up the right way and Higgs was fellating it properly. This obviously stressed his jaw, and his hands flew up, shoved at everything and nothing, but the good Captain was now immovable.   
  
Eldritch, rising from the sea. Higgs would be his Innsmouth, and his mouth indeed would speak of this later.   
  
“You’ll want to loosen up.” Of course, this was a reference to the oral penetration, to the way the Beretta plunged in deeper, but that secondary tendril had also traveled into the man’s garments to tease at an entrance far more tender, and perhaps less utilized; perhaps of course being the most abstract assumption. He knew, from their joining, from this strange meld, that this wasn’t his first. And it would not be his last.   
  
In,   
  
and in.   
  
The push of something more concrete into Monaghan’s ass made him tense. It was warm. Luckily for the terrorist, it was slick with oil, with whatever tarry nonsense bloated Cliff’s veins. But it was also  **thick** . The shadow-man, the Shuyet coupled with Ka could feel each and every twitch of his innards, a delicacy that was strange, different from the first time he’d inundated him. It was slick, and resistant, and he found himself craving that fight, that peculiar wildness. So he pushed deeper, til he knew he was curled somewhere awful inside a stomach.   
  
This would be hard to think of later. So instead, he considered it now.   
  
And with a push of the gun into the padding of his throat, ripping the hard edges of the small sight atop the weapon into the palate at the top of his mouth, coupled with that thick umbilical extension giving a vicious shove upward…   
  
The bile, whatever remained of the sandwich, the way it retched from the man was inevitable. The sourness stung the air, and Unger pulled back slightly to give him room. Removed the gun to let him swallow. Then immediately replaced it when he gasped for air, as he played internally with his innards.   
  
It was time to address intent.   
  
“I know what you mean to do, Higgs.”   
  
He watched, with interest, as the man normally so talkative and full of words, tongued the side of the gun in his mouth, staring in pain and bliss and oh-so-fulness, quaking as he was pressed back to tree bark and grass. He wouldn’t drown him this time. He’d have a soft place to land.   
  
“You intend...to use me. As that bitch did. You intend freedom for yourself. You think this is parasitic, or...symbiotic, until you can leave an old man in the memory of war. But let me make this abundantly clear...”   
  
Higgs laughed, and tried to mouth something. He shut up as soon as the gun was thrust forward again, reluctant to egg on any more vomit.   
  
Drool. Spittle. Bile. Blood. The fluids dripping down Monaghan’s throat were growing in number.   
  
Cliff didn’t seem to notice. Or mind, as he leaned down, scented the other much as he’d first been scented upon Higgs’s arrival near his person, and pressed the softest of kisses to his cheek, even as he wormed his way deeper into his body with both umbilical strands. “If you want this to work...then accept that I own you now.   
  
“And start sucking.”   
  
Those staring eyes seemed to look at him with a “you can’t be serious” air, though it was abundantly clear that Unger meant every kind of business. Nevertheless, urged on by a push at the scruff of his neck...Higgs gave a protesting noise, but in contrast his cheeks hollowed, and he sucked on the weapon, laved it with his tongue.   
  
Sobbed as Clifford let his pushing hand feel his finger tighten on the trigger.   
  
This would be his life. Forever held at the end of a pistol. There would only be one hostage, and it would NOT be Clifford Unger.   
  
_ Welcome to eternity. _   
  
His body sang in bliss, at the utter supremacy he was gaining.   
  
Perhaps this shadow was more him than previously thought. Perhaps they could be properly mated. And the glue, the seal, would be a sad, sick little man. Useful, but easily strung.   
  
The gun was casually cast off, the tension now properly built. It could come into play later. But there was something so simple, something so... _ normal _ , that he hadn’t done yet. Something ritualistic, in its foundations, in the context of mastery over man. The gun was holstered, and Higgs spat, Higgs gasped, Higgs bled and shuddered. Higgs was dragged up to his knees, not without the help of the stiffening cord that still fucked him, not without Unger’s notice of his troubled erection, and how it wept for Daddy, sweet Daddy.   
  
His mouth, ruined already, would be the first hole to take his cock, and take it he did, once slacks were unbelted, unbuttoned. There was an unspoken gratitude for something softer, more meaningful, that didn’t make his jaw ache nearly as bad, at least until the soft trail of hair on Cliff’s belly met his gnarled face, his broken nose.   
  
A gratitude still, in the way the younger man suddenly clutched at the backs of the man’s thighs, not even driven by their newly-forged tether. That was all him. All the staring, wide-eyed man with the name of a dead boy scrawled on his arm and the magic of science carved into his face.    
  
He suckled the uncut cock threatening to breach the depths of him with more fervor than he had the sidearm. A request, his way of begging without begging, to not have that thing shoved in his mouth again.    
  
The Captain couldn’t promise anything. He wouldn’t. Not to a cur, not to a waif, not to this simpering fool who’d dipped himself in gold to make a mockery of his pain.    
  
When he fucked his throat, it was with abandon, and he took great pleasure in the way Monaghan  _ let him _ . Things were settling molding and melting. Ease was granted. Sobs hiccuped when the other could gain air, at the way he teased whatever sphincter held tight the actual capacity of his stomach’s lining. Soon, he’d breach him in that manner, he’d fuck him as a man should, but that was earned. For now, his mouth was his cunt, and Cliff had him nice and open.   
  
Higgs wasn’t picky. He’d eat anything he pulled for him.    
  
And the Ha had to feed.   
  
When the connection melded, when his spine was felt through skin and above it, when the press of his boot came on the man’s cock down below, when he clutched at Higgs’s hair with surprising gentleness but slammed his sex down a pacified gullet…   
  
He saw stars, and Higgs screamed his agony with whatever air he had left. He came. And so too, did he. Shared in this climax, this disgusting branding of his soul, this tarnishing that Unger found himself strangely at peace with. The air electrified, and something...changed. Something around the terrorist shuddered, and shifted, and the aura of his DOOMS surged, even without the doll Amelie had given him present...And he held him there. He held him until Higgs, unwilling to struggle, the tether tightly bound, reddened from lack of oxygen, blacked out, his dick still dripping blackened cum down down down through his esophagus and into his tortured belly.   
  
And as he stared at the space beyond the trees, he let his eyes shift just sideways. He let himself focus just beyond what was apparent, allowed everything to blur, then dangerously sharpen.   
  
He met  **her** eyes.   
  
And he smiled.   
  
\--   
  
The mark on the back of his neck was an ugly, thing, where he’d been once more violated. Cliff stroked his fingers around the jagged edges with tenderness. Guilt still ate around the edges of his vision, but he was hanging tight to whatever part of him he’d summoned with their coupling. Doubtless it would soon be gone, leaving him to be the tragic, wandering, semi-aloof hero.    
  
Higgs was breathing again, strewn over his lap like an enraptured St. Teresa, his mind not...yet fully back in his conniving body. That was something. It was useless, to murder him upon the shore. That had already been decided.    
  
What wasn’t useless, or would be considered so once it was honed, would be this newfound glory. He needed practice, certainly. But if Monaghan could be tied into him, if he could call the storm, if he could work such wonders, with this particular man by his side…   
  
Yes. Yes, he could call him hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dad, you ruined my Subway Cold Cut Combo
> 
> This was really indulgent and I’m almost sorry.
> 
> We gonna get into the thick of the plot soon.


	6. pull

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Out of the frying pan...

He could feel it. 

Through clothing. Through skin. At any given moment, like teeth permanently set on either side of his spine in a hunter’s bite, holding the cervical vertebrae hostage, eliciting the most gentle form of panic from him when the illimitable link gave a  _ squeeze _ and made Higgs slap at the nape of his neck, searching for a hidden viper’s sting. 

He didn’t find anything. Not when Cliff was there. Not when Cliff was absent. Yet he felt his kiss all the same. 

It seemed the pattern of his life, the irony, to have the power of a god, only to fall through the fingers of owner after owner, lead after lead, obsession after obsession. How he longed to dig his boot in and surpass the daunting mount!

[ _ Life just ain’t like that, son _ .]

And now, the tether. 

How long did he have to bear it? Was this, as their first meeting forebodingly indicated, forever?

The surfaces of the terrorist’s molars, already somewhat worn, ground together in his anxiety, smoking as he was, once more, sitting and watching the sea with comrade and captor. 

For fuck’s sake. 

Higgs lifted his leg, moved it sideways. It intertwined with the soldier’s, sitting next to him. Cliff didn’t budge an inch. The chiral tattooing, the diseased, glittering message inked across his forehead caught some filtered light from the foreign sun, as he breathed smoke and exhaled verbage all at once. “So. You got any sort of forecast, or is this literally wank and wait?”

“Soon.”

“Soon?”

A calm, sincere nod in return. Unger raised his hand-rolled cigarette. Pulled on it. Then let it fade into singed, burning ash. Smoke left the appealing planes of his lips after, gentle as he’d spoken. And there, Monaghan’s eyes lingered for a selfish amount of time, enraptured by a mouth and its possibilities. 

Clifford noticed, and he didn’t have to say so. He knew. He felt their strange connection twitch with recognition, and frustratingly, mirth. 

The man seemed to have found some source of nirvana in the past days, or cycles, whatever time quantified itself as here. Something in their last coupling had elevated him past previous disquietude. 

And though they waited on the rocks and sand, their theories had been cemented into a plan. 

Osiris would walk the beach, and him with him, searching not for a broken piece of him but that which would fragment and allow them to travel. They’d done so for a few “cycles,” searching for the gap, the precipice that had allowed him to soar in a screaming rage to search for his son. To kill his son, in some inadvertent manner. 

Without Amelie’s blessing, travel might not be possible, but what else was there to do?

Yet...yet. 

With a connection to the outside, there was the potential of being able to summon the supercell Higgs had so avoided on the mortal plane. The storm. The lightning. Summoning timefall had been a power trip, a party trick meant to terrify, and fuck if it didn’t work. Now his mutation, the sickness rotting his body since childhood could certainly be the key to their survival, their way to use Cliff’s shadow to skip past the Nile’s banks. 

If it worked. 

His silver-glazed blue eyes rolled sideways to stare at the other, not bothering to lay any sort of curtain to disguise his sharpness, his impatience. “Why the hell’d we stop, then? You gettin’ tired, gramps? Ready to lie down and die all over again?”

Teeth. Back of his neck. Squeezing like a vice. 

He did his best to maintain his expression, but the way he heaved out a panting breath, the sweat that beaded just below one of his angular cheekbones...they revealed his anguish.

Clifford eyed him, not impassive. Disappointed. 

God, he hated when he did that. If he’d ever had a proper father, maybe he’d be used to it. 

[Instead he just had a lineage of men called Daddy, and their drooping, disdain-ridden, gorgeous mouths.]

“I wasn’t ready the first time.” The Captain said this even and slow, as though speaking to someone a tenth his age. The irony of his current clothing, that very blazer, so Higgs had been told, has been spattered and soaked in gore as he lay dying for the sake of a son not born. “And I don’t think you were, from the look of you, those times I saw her bring you here.”

Higgs couldn’t help but bark the jackal’s laugh at that one. 

“Repatriation’s

[ _ the sea was cold the sky was cold as he frantically fondled his flesh searching for the bullets the water choked in his throat the skull fractures the stab wounds that same laugh resounding through his body as he lay at her feet over and over asking her to point out the newest mortal wound the bruise the stain the slash again and again until he learned his fucking lesson _ ]

a bitch, what can I say?”

Disappointment turned to some sibling of worry, that troubling pity, yet again. Higgs lightly punched his Daddy’s arm, and stood. “Stop.”

Cliff had his lovely mouth set in a line. Funny, to see him try and process something that nearly signified fondness, for the first time in ages; but it never quite made it past the wall of indentured servitude. 

They would walk again. 

—

It took three more days of paced walking, along the shore. Sometimes Unger was present physically, sometimes it was like that goddamn footprints poem he’d found in a worn, nearly unreadable copy of Reader’s Digest. 

But he was no Christ. No savior, not in the sense of that now antiquated faith. He wasn’t here to hold Higgs’s hand. He was here to use him, as much as he’d been used, as much as Monaghan sought to use him in his own right. 

He never felt it more than when his breath was on his neck, when his tongue traced his slow, slow pulse, more artful than the younger’s sloppy slobbering vulgar displays. Higgs licked to taste. Unger tasted to know. 

That motherfucker. 

“Close.”

It was all he said, but there was a change, an electricity. The heightened olfactory senses Higgs possessed pricked, and doubly so when he felt Clifford quiver, when he felt the hand that dug its fingers into his ass tremble in anticipation of his translocation.

What would he do, if they returned? Was there anything left for a phantasm in the world of the living? His sneering mouth relinquished a bite in the Captain’s shoulder to ask, but a moan fell before the meditation. Clifford smirked. Again. The mouth. It would be the death of him. 

Higgs rolled his shoulders, sat up from where his bare form was strewn beneath the clothed other, hissed a panting breath and tried to roll the Captain, and instead received a quick punch to the throat, which made him groan and gargle and laugh. 

“Startin’....mmmh—to think you were a boxer, babe.”

“You need to stop thinking.”

Warning blow, not enough to really knock the wind out of him. 

They mingled like this. Cliff was exploring the tether, understanding in turn what power it held and how it could be further exploited. How it could be worked. Higgs, in response, naturally tried to buck it, in spite of his worship. After all, what was faith without a little questioning? Tempering? 

And quietly, Higgs considered, if their bond flowed both ways. Tug of war wasn’t his strong suit, but subterfuge was. If he could just  **pull** —

Mouth on his mouth, pressed to him with that overflow of metal and musk and electric pain. Teeth. There was a violence to him, in spite of the fact that he knew this was Cliff, and no mere shadow. His conscious self had tasted blood, and Higgs both feared and lived in awe of watching his addiction foster and grow. 

One of his hands scrabbled down past the man’s tattooed arms, brushed the trail of hair down his belly, and palmed his oozing cock. “When’s this goin’ in me, huh Daddy? When do I get the package?” Teeth spread, bloody gums blackened from the excretion of his lover’s corrupted mouth. 

Another kiss, a suck of his bottom lip. 

Cliff smacked his hand away. Pressed his busy fingers further into the willing cunt of his aching ass. Added a third with a surprisingly cruel twist of his wrist. 

“When I  _ fucking say you do _ , Monaghan.”

[danger: high voltage]

No drug, no pain, nothing shook his foundations quite like the rotting purr of Clifford Unger’s sex-drenched voice. 

Not even their strange connection, which now seemed to ache with want at the back of his mind. Revealing everything, a library of sin and debauchery on display like a buffet if Cliff could find the coordination to partake. 

Another crook of his fingers and Higgs’s hips slammed upward. Something sparked between them. The fondling of his prostate (something the ex-soldier seemed well-versed in: visions that glimmered in through their shared consciousness now and then of a dark, gorgeous young man half-dressed man in fatigues seemed to speak to previous experience) was so precise, so repetitive, that it had his sex rigid and red, had him drenching his own cock and balls with so much pre-spending that little lubricant was required to continue. His own cum, slicked on the man’s fingers to his knuckles, was fucked in and out of him, milking until more was needed. 

Edged to hell and back again. 

But each press, each flare of light behind his eyes, every lick at his sacred inner wound shoved him closer to a heightened state. Every stroke and throb put him in a mindset, pulled upon his body’s ills from his DOOMS, and sent them to the surface. 

He could almost feel the mask again, gilding his face in a pharaoh’s splendor, whether he deserved it or not.

[ _ Close _ .]

Cliff’s free hand locked over the crooked cartouche inked on Higgs’s forearm first with intensity, then seemed to settle there in the most odd caress. Over each glyph, each syllable. 

One, and two. 

Did he know what they meant?

Gasping, he tried to sit upright. Tried to glean it from the face above him that was just as invested in their coupling, from eyes mahogany that betrayed nothing but a zeal he knew too well. He was pressed back down, slow, in contrast with the fingers that now started to hammer into him, that blossomed open, pulling an agonized whine from the most loathed part of the terrorist’s chest. 

_ Did he know? _

He didn’t want him to. He wanted to retain the mystery. The mythology. He wanted to be the god, not get played by one. 

Tracing again, syllables one and two. 

In a vast turn of mood, though he was on the precipice of an orgasm and grinning the fool, Higgs gave a howl of anger, of irritation. He thrashed. 

The tether was suddenly there, material now. He was sucked back down to the ground with a thump that drove every air molecule out of his lungs. 

Cliff wet his fingers using his drippings. Continued.

He’d have to run dry now. Dry soon. Surely he didn’t have much left in him. 

The tang in the air intensified, and he found himself back in the bog, forced to pay witness to the cynosure of pleasure he wasn’t certain he desired, as every bit of what composed Unger started to move through him again, digging and delving where he didn’t belong. 

No, he belonged. He belonged there. Osiris, black-tongued, king of Egypt could have whatever he pleased, even if it was the jackal. 

And almost certainly his designated helpmeet. 

His belly felt singeing hot, and he twisted his toes in the gravel, bent one knee of a spread leg to do so. That much seemed to be allowed, and wasn’t corrected. Those inner nerves had been caressed, and now they felt mutilated, abused. If Cliff would just relent, would relinquish somewhere between two extremes, he could focus. Could manage. 

His jaws snapped with nothing to bite. 

His hands fished for umbilical cords to tow him up. 

Nothing came, nothing was there, but like a phantom limb, he pulled. He squeezed silver and blue eyes tightly shut and pulled. He sought bliss and pain, suddenly threw his leg around Clifford’s waist. 

He  **screamed** . 

He  **pulled** . 

Nothing. 

Aside from the slightest breeze at his cheek, faintly registered. Or was that breath? Cliff’s mouth seemed to follow it up, and passion was known between them in the kiss that followed. 

A swell of pleasure came from the pivot at the back of his neck. 

“Again.”

Breeze. A shift. The clouds were moving more quickly. None of it made sense. Like a page folded over a little too far, he felt it now, a breeze beneath the drafty shelter door. To a world that wasn’t supposed to exist. To what was bigger. He understood now. 

Days they’d walked, through a proverbial desert. When he’d dragged him to the ground each time and fucked him into nothing, he’d asserted that it was for explorative purposes. To make Higgs suffer. To subjugate him. But that purpose was secondary. 

He’d been checking the keyholes. 

In his mind’s eye, the only one open at the moment, he could see it, explained with a politeness that bordered on offensive. 

When he’d been left alone, he wasn’t being watched. It was recon. Guessing, largely. 

And then the key had been brought in, brought low, and tested. 

But this had never happened before. Not on this plane, not without the doll swaddled in amniotic fluid and the muzzle over his damnable mouth. Everything felt...alive. Dead and alive, as the Duat was meant to be. The friends he’d forged felt so much closer, with masks the same as his and forms intangible. BTs. He could feel them. Chirality.  **Realness.** He could feel it. Distant and crying out, the long-lost lover he’d spurned through his hubris. 

He choked back a disgusting sob. 

“Again.”

Again? Push again? Break again? Maybe some concoction of the two, swirled and aerated in preparation for Cliff to drink him down. That wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to survive, and something of that must have slipped through their connection, because there was the Captain’s voice, murmuring, even, even as he felt his insides pang with misery,

“Then  _ fight for it _ , son.”

Fight.

**Fight** . 

His teeth gritted, and his feet clawed into the gravel and sand. Somewhere in this unique subspace, where he felt so unaware and aware 

[was this how Unger felt all the time?]

of all that surrounded him, he threaded himself into the familiar sensation of control. Of familiarity itself. Of Cliff’s fingers, the choke of tar, the rising tide. Of quiet nights spent alone in a chosen cell, plastered in pictures of the enemy, making love to a concept on a screen for days at a time. All of it touchable, from this one unique space. 

When his eyes opened, and he met Cliff’s, the man looked...excited. He met the expression. He echoed it. A reflection, of madness and frenzy, of the things they shared that they screamed into one another’s throats. The shared experience. The stranding. The loss. The same, and yet so different, and yet so identical. One and two. 

As above, so below. 

His thighs clenched, and urged on by the maddening presence in his head, in each and every cell, brought on by the harshness of a yell, one that he felt would bloody his vocal cords in the effort—he came. And as he fell apart, he forced himself immediately back together…

And pulled. 

The sky split, and a singular bolt of lightning thumped the rocks next to them, a regular Jacob’s ladder arcing in a perpendicular line to the earth. Gravel spat over them both, and it seemed a slight line was scored, singed across Cliff’s cheek. 

In the moments where he feared his heart had stopped, he had missed the way that those fingers had slid out, replaced by the core of the other man that had been pulled out in the meantime. The cock was filling. Was delightful, thick, and dreadfully alive. And when Higgs remembered how to breathe, the first breath he gave was a choked and thankful sob. 

Cliff wasn’t fucking him, moreso stroking the length of his engorged, pulsing dick into the opened, ruined channel of his ass. But when he came, viscous and black within him, all was well and forgiven, healed by the low, pulverant murmur of two damnable words. 

“ _ Good boy _ .”

He should have been repulsed. Should have killed the man. Should have pulled another bolt from the heavens to erase him with finality. 

Instead, he fisted his fingers in Cliff’s clothing and howled a lament into his chest, of relief and torture, perfectly married. 

His hair was stroked by a calloused, tar-stained hand. 

[Good boy.] 

—

“You still don’t know this will work.”

“Neither do you.”

Cigarettes. Shoreline. Keyhole in the distance. And gathering clouds. Higgs’s fingers itched with a need to proceed, but he knew he wouldn’t get anywhere without Unger’s Shuyet to tug them through that impossible space. 

Nicotine seemed necessary. He still hurt physically, yes, but this was for the nerves, for the gathering of required courage to make the journey. Monaghan closed his eyes. Pulled on the brand. Exhaled. 

Once again clothed in what had become his signature garb, they’d prepared to travel. Clifford seemed to think his fatigues best for battle—and he was more than likely correct. Higgs had been in his share of scuffles with a variety of opponents, but war, as appealing as it may have sounded to him at any given point, was not his field of expertise. 

But through the keyhole, and beyond...he could use the tar. The BTs. He could find his mask. Ascension after a fall...it would only temper him, make him shine more brightly than Amelie had ever held him accountable for. 

His eyes trailed to the side, watched his stoic companion for a beat, and then he was striding forward, partway into the lapping waves. “Well then. Best we get started, ain’t it, Daddio?”

Cliff eyed him quizzically, noting the dangling cigarette as the younger talked. Arms held wide. Truthfully, it was refreshing to be able to remain an enigma to someone like Clifford Unger. 

“Time is of the essence.” He agreed, and was soon enough, in the water with him. 

There was no way of knowing where they’d pop out, with no outer source geo-locating for them. They’d walked a long ways. Maybe they’d drown in the ocean. Freeze in the snow. And all of that would come after the initial journey through the ruined landscape of Cliff’s hellish beach. 

The man’s hands on his wrists...would have been troubling, but instead, he considered them a relief. Welcome. And this time they skirted the tattoo he knew to be below. 

Unger didn’t ask if Higgs was ready. He didn’t need to. 

“Harder this time. Multiple strikes. The clouds will pull us through.”

“Don’t gotta tell me twice.”

Only hours had passed since his latest violation on the beach. He was still tired. But he was more tired of being stuck here before his time. 

Under the ex-soldier’s watchful eye, he shifted. He focused on a point over the elder man’s shoulder. And he sent out feelers, metaphorically speaking, for what he’d sought before with ease. 

It wasn’t as simple as it might have been, but the amplification of their connection made it…easier, somehow. He didn’t question it. Didn’t analyze it. Yet. But he settled into it, trying to find a comfortable place to drown. 

“It’s like before. When you used to move yourself.”

Was it? In theory, yes. The part of the theory he had come up with himself. Higgs felt a swell of pride in that. The genius behind their salvation was him. Cliff, the accessory. The man had given up. There had been nothing left but a solemn shore, and hate. But now that hate was driving them both to bigger and better things. 

When he considered Amelie, internally, Unger seemed to feed on it. 

“You think she’s alive?”

“I mean...was she ever?”

Clifford considered this. Set his jaw, torqued it tight in  _ just that way _ , the disdain that made Higgs want to kiss him. 

So he did. Leaned down just slightly, closed the gap, drew his lips and then his tongue along the stunning, sharp line of his mandible, before murmuring, “Imagine what we do if she is.”

The smile was worth it, in all it’s crooked cruelty, swept in an arc like the very cut of his own golden blade. “Concentrate.” Cliff chided, and yet there was a soft note of poison beyond what often blackened his lips. 

He focused for him. 

Like a jump. It was supposed to be like a jump. 

Higgs remembered to breathe when Cliff pressed on his lithe chest. 

The gap was there. The earlier electric snap to the air has left it revealed to his sight, to his senses, plain as day. When he reached for it, it reached back. The wind stirred around them, and the clouds gathered. 

“That’s it, Higgs. Pull it close. Surrender to it.”

That much wasn’t difficult. Monaghan could get drunk on that intimate, recognizable sensation. The very clouds were his. The sky was his. It was his birthright. 

Sparks above him. Churning waves below. 

“Closer. Stay with me. You’re shaking.”

Lightning. Teasing the water. Calling the storm, same as breathing. There was no timefall here. He wanted timefall. 

“Higgs.”

He wanted ruined earth. And tar. And a bent, corrupted world. It was dying. But it was his.

He pulled.

The storm came, faster than anticipated, swept in with whipping winds and shrieking hail. Somewhere, Cliff was gripping him. 

“Don’t go far.”

Higgs regarded him with a face streaked in black. 

“You’re back in the belly of the whale.”

His mouth parted. 

“ _ And I need you _ .”

Nothing else could be heard. 

—

Mortars were deafening. Higgs had heard a fucking atomic bomb go off, but there was something incredibly visceral about the particular thump of a mortar firing. 

It woke him. It stirred him from the dirt, had him bolting to his feet. 

Smoke. Mortar. Tar. 

War. 

The tanks in front of him crawled with strange, biomechanical apparati. The soldiers faded in and out, and he recognized with a macabre excitement...they were BTs—or similar enough to them that they created a buzz in his skull. They could be used. Maintained. 

The first leap was a success, but fear soon snaked around his heart, as a bullet hissed far too close to his face for comfort, and no amount of tugging at these strangers granted him any gain. He was still cut off. Still separated. In a war zone, with no weapon, and firearms his weakness after his deep and crippling reliance on his powers. 

He dropped down to his knees at the next explosion, hurled himself behind a barrier, then realized something far worse. 

Higgs scrabbled partway up to look over the barricade. Looked around with anxiety, and swallowed whatever bile rose. 

He was stranded, at war, unarmed, with his abilities still in deep reserve. 

And Clifford Unger was nowhere to be found. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When will I get motivationally fingered by Cliff Unger?
> 
> This took a while to publish, my bad. I’m finicky.
> 
> Next chapter you may get to see how the turn tables


End file.
